His nightmare slaughterhouse roused a national outcry in the United States, but not for what was the socialist Sinclair's main objective: better quality of life for the working class. Instead, demands were made for a better quality of meat. "I aimed at the public's heart," Sinclair lamented, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

Typically immigrants (as in The Jungle) and dirt-poor whites, few modern slaughterhouse workers possess decent medical insurance to manage their injuries, which remain high, or the funds to seek the psychological counseling that might prevent meatpackers from holding one of the top-three jobs for suicide.

Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation picked up where Sinclair left off, though Schlosser based his book on the role that modern fast food has played in maintaining the grim conditions of animal slaughter in America. He also explored fast food's impact upon the culture at large, from urban planning (or the lack thereof) to the way Americans eat.

Reducing all of this important book into a fictional film narrative was a brave act, though one that finally defeated Schlosser and his co-writer, director Richard Linklater. They adopted a multi-storied structure in which, as in 2005's Crash, individual characters collide and create a cohesive cultural picture.

Strangely, Schlosser and Linklater never succeed in having the various strands of their narrative mesh. This might have been purposeful, as the landscape of modern America — that "geography of nowhere," in the words of writer James Howard Kunstler — has bred such dire anomie and isolation that people cannot really connect anymore. If that's the case, it's an interesting approach, yet one that doesn't yield much in the way of narrative drive.

The characters cut across all class lines. There is the burger-chain executive investigating reports of e coli in his company's "Big One" burger, the poor high-school kids slaving away in one of the chain's franchises, a grizzled rancher who has seen his share of despoliation of the countryside, and a group of illegal Mexican immigrants who find themselves on the killing floors of the Moloch-like meat industry.

The immigrants' tale is the most powerful, which often makes the sudden flights to follow other stories seem digressive. And, as with Blood Diamond, too much of the dialogue becomes declamation. There are ideas here, important ones, but they aren't being naturally articulated.

Linklater's cast is really first-rate. Greg Kinnear is the burger exec who will finally choose a willed ignorance about the quality of his company's burgers rather than do the ethical thing, and Ashley Johnson is Amber, a young high-school girl flipping burgers who has a political awakening. Particularly good are Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as Amber's mother and uncle.

The industrialized agriscape of middle America is marvelously captured by Linklater. In a flyover of a vast expanse of cattle-feed lots, all set out in a grid, one can see the same design at play among the nearby acres of self-storage tract houses and the attendant strips of chain-driven commercial squalor that serve the houses' inhabitants. But this is also one of the film's flaws.

That we are all willfully blinkered to the murder that's tidily packaged on the supermarket meat aisle and have fallen into a consensual trance before the depredations of American capitalism is a given in Fast Food Nation. We have accepted the values of machines as our own. So now what?

If Blood Diamond insists on the pretty ruse of ultimate justice, Fast Food Nation delivers such a portrait of moral paralysis and human weakness that the very urge to act is nullified as too little, too late. So, enjoy your Happy Meal.