Directed by Richard Linklater

When I heard about this film I had my doubts - how could a fictionalised film ever be a satisfactory ‘version' of a complex, meticulously researched, many-stranded non-fiction expose of the fast food industry? Had I known that Eric Schlosser, author of the book, had actually sought out Linklater to make the film, then collaborated with him on the screenplay, and that Linklater himself had had the same reservations, I would have been more optimistic. And rightly so. Taking three of the ‘human interest' strands and fictionalising them obviously makes a far broader, and blunter, sweep of the subject matter, but it is powerfully done, and avoids the sentimentality that you might think would be inescapable when hard facts are humanised and generalised. And hopefully lots of the people who wouldn't dream of reading a very dense (though also grippingly readable) non-fiction book might be engaged by it.

Don (Greg Kinnear) is a good-hearted, bright-eyed marketing man charged by his bosses at fast food giants ‘Micky's', with investigating the allegations that a fair amount of cowshit has been detected in their burgers. Meanwhile we track the experiences of a group of illegal immigrants on their grim journey across the border, bound for work at the meatpackers. In many ways it's sad to see Catalina Sandrino Moreno cast again as a poor powerless victim, following her stunning performance as a drug mule in Maria Full of Grace, but she really has such qualities of integrity that you can't deny she's a real asset here, and her immensely sad playing of her final scene on the meat packing factory's killing floor is a sight to behold. [But please, casting directors, offer her something different next time.She's special.] Between them the small group portray the whole gamut of the woes of the illegals - physical danger and harm, sexual pressure, financial deprivation, hard ugly work, and just sheer misery - it's unrealistic to visit so much on so small a group of characters, but does that matter?

The third set of characters involved are the underpaid and unprotected young people who work at Mickey outlets, focussing on bright student Amber, fitting in work to save for the college education she longs for, in between schoolwork and a sisterly concern for her freewheeling mother. When she does actually take a moral stand (the only character to take power into her own hands, in fact), after coming into the sphere of a group of idealistic students who talk a lot and do little about the situation, she becomes an activist herself.

Big names abound. Kris Kristofferson is in wise and mellow mode as an old fashioned rancher, and Bruce Willis splendid as the cheerfully cynical middle man between meat-packer and distributor, trotting out the old saw that eating a little dirt is good for you, (yes, but not e.coli) and that ‘the cooking kills it' (ditto). The same can't be said sadly for Ethan Hawke's overlong and gratingly right-on role as Amber's ‘hip' uncle, a part which brings little to the argument or the human interest.

It's bleakly depressing - more so than the book, I think, because it takes its analysis further than the particular industry, to show how the sticky web of capitalism holds just about everyone trapped. It gets to everybody - Don's good salary, comfortable home and nice children are his hostages to fortune, and it would take a brave man in his position to go public about what he, in the end, decides not to rock the boat by investigating too fully. The immigrants and those who traffick them are equally powerless in their dependency to find a new life and to hang onto the grubby lives they have made for themselves. There will always be someone to do the metaphorical, or actual, dirty work. Out of this heap of misery, profits are made and people are damaged. And the whole immense intermeshed situation is too much for well-meaning activists to have much of an effect - when they try to liberate the cattle, the cattle aren't interested and refuse to make their bid for freedom. Like the rest of us, they are too entrenched in the way things are and their own immediate comfort.

As I left the cinema I passed a McDonald's. People were shuffling out, as listless as if they were coming out of the factory gates - presumably they'd just had their Happy Meals. How did we all get to this? The first McDonald's I visited was somewhere on Holloway Road in the late 70s. It was a strangely innocent, quite thrilling experience, the first time I'd bought food in that quirky way, or eaten the exotic dill pickles, or that odd spongy bread, or drunk root beer. I felt like I'd wandered onto the set of The Last Picture Show, it was another kind of ethnic eating experience. Now, with its cheapness, its offers of trinkets from film tie-ins, and the judiciously timed new lines on offer, it's embedded in the eating habits of the nation. Does anyone actually enjoy it any more? Or is enjoyment not a word we nowadays associate with food? It's just a way of life, and like the ‘freed' cattle in the film, we seem unable to choose to move out of what is habit, however indifferent we feel towards it.

This film has been variously criticised for being too didactic, too soft, too formulaic, too emotional, too serious and too simplistic. Snooty critics poke scorn at the right-on actors queueing up to appear in it to boost their leftish credentials, and at what they see as a dilution of the hard truths of the book. But there's nothing wrong with popularising, if that's what this is, a serious and important book, and if it's good enough for Eric Schlosser, it's good enough for me.

Seen at Empire Cinema, Newcastle, 3 May 2007