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The Brian Mulroney Biopic Is a Hallucinatory String of Heritage Minutes

A new TIFF documentary turns the lens on the Canadian cult of personality

“In politics,” Brian Mulroney once opined, “you need two things: friends, but above all, an enemy.”

John F. Kennedy, who famously pledged to forgive his rivals but never to forget their names, couldn’t have said it better. Nor his bête noire Richard Nixon, who made sure to keep a list handy at all times.

Matthew Rankin’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is a documentary about uneasy alliances and heated rivalries; stylistically, it gives its subject the Oliver Stone treatment, just like JFK and Tricky Dick before him. We’re used to seeing American presidents get that kind of iconoclastic cinema showcase, but Rankin—who’s the wryest Manitoban filmmaker this side of Guy Maddin—has cornered the market on cracked Canadian idolatry. His 2019 William Lyon Mackenzie King biopic The Twentieth Century memorably featured an ethereal harp player and brutal, bloody bouts of seal clubbing within its semi-factual narrative about the man dubbed “Weird Willie.” This follow-up sees and raises its predecessor by depicting its namesake as Liberace, descending into the 1976 Tory leadership convention in a flying convertible, with neon lights blaring his personal and political credentials. “He’s an Electrician’s Son!” reads one sign. “Fully Bilingual!” crows another.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is split into six episodes that chronicle the transformative period between 1976 and 1983, in the years when Mulroney was vying for Progressive Conservative leadership and before he was elected prime minister, representing the federal riding of Manicouagan, Quebec. Insofar as the film has a thesis, it pivots on the aforementioned dialectic between friends and enemies and how Mulroney paradoxically succeeded in uniting a country riven by party and linguistic differences by picking fights in every direction. Emerging from the middle of nowhere—actually Baie-Comeau, Quebec—the young corporate lawyer split the difference between indignance and ingratiation with his conservative elders; he’s captured here via archival footage as a preening enfant terrible, firing well-aimed one-liners into his own ranks. Mulroney’s quips and potshots—including plenty of swipes at government corruption—hit their targets more consistently than the public pronouncements of more seasoned Tories like Joe Clark—and in fluent French to boot. Call our sharpshooting anti-hero the Manicouagan Candidate.

Clark may have won the battle in 1976 to succeed Robert L. Stanfield as the leader of........

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