By John Corrado
The latest work from Winnipeg filmmaker Matthew Rankin (The 20th Century, Universal Language), Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is a gonzo Canadian political documentary by way of archival footage collage, and, well, it rocks.
Backed by the National Film Board, this portrait of Canada’s 18th Prime Minister is a lot wackier than one might expect from a doc about a world leader. This is very much a Matthew Rankin film, utilizing tons of humour, visual style, and a banger soundtrack to show Brian Mulroney’s chess-like moves to become Progressive Conservative leader and finally Prime Minister.
Broken up into chapters with humorous title cards, the first stretch of the film focuses on the 1976 PC leadership convention. This is when Brian Mulroney, a lawyer from Baie-Comeau with a working class upbringing who had never been elected to parliament, first tried to take over the party, but faced a series of challengers, including Joe Clark.
Anyone who has followed intra-party politics will find this stuff fascinating, showing how Mulroney was waiting in the wings for the perfect time to orchestrate his long-in-the-works coup for the party leadership. The PC party faced challenges trying to find a leader popular enough to take on Pierre Trudeau and stop the reign of the Liberal Party (sound familiar?), while facing the perennial challenge of trying to have an electoral breakthrough in Quebec and actually win more than a couple of seats in the province.
Rankin’s film aims to capture how, by 1984, with Reagan dominating in the States, our country was willing to elect the boy from Baie-Comeau with the Paul Newman eyes and the Robert Redford hair to lead us. The footage of him during his ascent, including from the 1984 campaign when he faced off against Liberal leader John Turner, remind us just how charming Mulroney really was (and how much his son, media personality Ben Mulroney, looks like him).
While Rankin has stated that he wouldn’t personally vote for Mulroney, the film itself is largely non-partisan, and easy for even Mulroney admirers (such as myself) to enjoy, as long as you have a good sense of humour. Rankin’s multimedia approach, complete with animation, glitch art, and tons of little sight gags, offers constant visual stimuli. It captures the psychedelic late-‘70s vibes, with the film fully embracing the absurdity of this time, and how it gave rise to a new, media-centric style of politics.
The amount of archival footage that Rankin has pulled together here is pretty incredible, with Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney serving as a totally impressive feat of creative editing. The film is simply a lot of fun to watch, and ultimately serves as a pretty awesome time capsule of Canadian political history.
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