THE STORY – Archival footage and psychedelic imagery blend to chronicle Brian Mulroney’s path from the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention to his election as prime minister.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Matthew Rankin (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 Minutes
Matthew Rankin has never been interested in telling Canadian history straight. His breakout feature, “The Twentieth Century,” turned Mackenzie King’s rise into a fever dream indebted to Guy Maddin and German Expressionism, and “Universal Language” imagined a Canada where Farsi displaced English as the national tongue. So it makes sense that when Rankin finally turns his camera to documentary, he doesn’t make anything formulaic. No talking heads, no chronological march from childhood to triumph, no manipulative beats to inspire. With “Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney,” Rankin flips the documentary formula on its head. What he delivers instead is a collage built from about 80,000 pieces of archival footage, cut with the rhythm of a game show, a sitcom, and a campaign ad all at once. It’s exhilarating filmmaking. It’s also, depending on how much you care about the internal politics of the Progressive Conservative Party circa 1976, either riveting or a slog.
The film opens with an anthem-scored montage of ocean, prairie, and industry that plays like a patriotic reflex before Rankin cuts in footage of Mulroney himself noting, with unintended irony, that a hardworking Canadian gets less of a tax break than the maker of some third-rate movie nobody would screen in their own basement. It’s a funny, self-aware connection, Mulroney unwittingly describing the kind of scrappy, offbeat film Rankin is actually making, and it signals early on that Rankin isn’t going to take any of this too seriously. Rankin sets a tone that portrays real curiosity and affection for his subject, but never worship. John Diefenbaker, Robert Stanfield, Pierre Trudeau, John Turner, and eventually Joe Clark are all folded into the story as a “supporting cast of hundreds of white dudes in clean shirts,” introduced with groovy ’70s title cards and colored circles like guests on a variety show. It’s a niche subject clearly built for people who already know this history, or at least find its texture funny on its own terms.
The film’s centerpiece is its treatment of the 1976 PC leadership convention, which Rankin restages as pure spectacle. Mulroney arrives in a “Back to the Future”-style car, caped and bejeweled, treated like a rock star arriving on stage while the actual delegates in the crowd look unimpressed, dubbed with fake snoring for comic effect. It’s a bold choice, staging the gap between the image a politician tries to project and the room’s real, muted reaction. It’s the sequence where Rankin’s satirical instincts are sharpest. Trudeau, meanwhile, as the sitting prime minister watching this whole convention unfold, is rendered as a supervillain surveilling the competition from a secret lair. This nods to the fact that this leadership race is ultimately about who might unseat him.
Rankin’s control of tone throughout is genuinely impressive. He can make grainy C-SPAN-adjacent footage of men giving speeches feel kinetic, largely through editing rhythm, music cues that lean sitcom or infomercial, and episode breaks that each borrow a different genre’s visual language, one styled like an old Western. The film’s most inventive sequence is a wholly constructed one. Mulroney wanders a museum built for Progressive Conservatives, arrives at a hall of preserved brains where Diefenbaker’s looms largest, and addresses it like a religious relic, asking for guidance. It’s absurd and strangely moving at once, treating political mythology as something worth both mocking and taking seriously.
Where the film runs into trouble is scope. Following Mulroney’s loss at the 1976 convention through Joe Clark’s rise, his brief government, and its collapse before Mulroney’s eventual ascent means much of the runtime is really about Clark. The film’s stated subject can start to feel like a supporting player in his own documentary. Rankin tries to paper over this by cutting Mulroney in as a silent observer, watching Clark’s arc with visible calculation, but we still spend too much time with the more uninteresting of the pair. The density of names, conventions, and legislative maneuvering also means the film demands a baseline familiarity with Canadian political history that many viewers won’t have. The craft carries you through the driest stretches, but craft alone can’t make a non-confidence vote from 1966 land as drama if you don’t already care.
None of that undercuts what Rankin’s pulls off here. This is one of the more inventive pieces of editing you’ll see this year, and it’s proof that archival documentary doesn’t have to choose between rigor and personality. It’s worth knowing going in that the pleasure here largely depends on whether you have an appetite for Canadian political history. As such, the subject of “Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney” may never quite match its style.
