Is it possible for an entire nation to have an inside joke? Manitoba-based filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s brilliant new film Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney goes even further, zeroing in on the slow, gradual, and yet somehow preternaturally ordained rise of Brian Mulroney, the Prime Minister who led his party, the Progressive Conservatives, out of a decades-long electoral wilderness, setting the stage for Canada to at long last dispense with the postwar Keynesian economic consensus and join Reagan and Thatcher in selling off the welfare state to the highest bidder.
A political outsider and businessman (sound familiar?), Mulroney was, in the words of one commentator, “the jaw that walks like a man,” a camera-ready empty suit who positioned himself as a common-sense everyman. He never tired of referring to his humble beginnings in Baie-Comeau, QC, the son of a factory worker and himself no stranger to hard work. An Irishman, Mulroney was able to triangulate French-Canadian resentment against the British-Protestant Anglophones, and as Rankin shows in great detail, he used just a bit of charisma to outflank his Tory rivals, most notably party leader/short-term PM Joe Clark, repeatedly referred to in the film as Joe Who?
Rankin has been known to go elbows-up and balls-deep into Canadian cultural and political lore. His film The Twentieth Century dramatized the rise of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who rose through the ranks by completing uniquely Canadian feats of leadership, like ribbon-cutting and beaver annihilation. And his most recent feature, Universal Language, orchestrated a Kiarostami-esque tale of poetic realism in the snowy plazas of Winnipeg. (One immortal scene takes place in a Tim Hortons with all-Persian signage and a hot tea samovar.) But Mulroney most closely resembles Rankin’s early compilation featurette Kubasa in a Glass. That film was culled from thousands of hours of Winnipeg TV commercials and local cable access, and it demonstrated Rankin’s ability to plumb the depths of the mundane and come up with nothing less than the soul of a people.
Originally planned as a multi-episode TV program(me), Mulroney is broken into episodes. Reports from the film’s world premiere at TIFF’s Midnight Madness screening suggest that it works like gangbusters as a theatrical feature, provided Canadian spectators represent a critical mass. However, it may work even better on home viewing, which allows both neophytes and mere non-obsessives the opportunity to pause the movie and consult Wikipedia for necessary background. The writer of this review is an American but prides himself on extensive familiarity with Canadian cultural and political history. Nevertheless, certain references, such as the ‘80s kids show Edison Twins or the partisan leanings of Wayne Gretzky, required further exploration for the jokes to really land.
But the star of the show is Rankin’s format, which employs the audiovisual tropes of late ‘70s/early ‘80s media to bring the Mulroney story to life. VCR scan lines, cheesy graphics, Electric Company-style animations, and the overall texture of early cable news are mobilized as vehicles for a plethora of archival material, including TV coverage of Tory conventions and election night results, as well as an infamous (within Canada) debate between Mulroney (as Leader of the Opposition) and Liberal PM John Turner, wherein the challenger dismantled Turner on the question of self-dealing and cronyism, a patronage system that, after seemingly eons of Trudeau’s premiership, Canadians had had enough of. To tweak a popular meme, Mulroney became Prime Minister in that moment.
In addition to being a joy to watch – C-SPAN delivered like echt-era MTV – Mulroney is also a stunning rejoinder to the supposed inevitability of generative AI. This is precisely the kind of project that a lazier, less creative filmmaker would have plugged into the prompt machine. Instead, Rankin and his team — which includes effects wizard/Guy Maddin collaborator Galen Johnson — use 16mm and digital animation, matte effects, composite re-enactments, and hours upon hours of good old-fashioned archival research to produce a document of historical perspicacity and comedic achievement that recalls the glory days of SCTV. Do you have to be Canadian to love Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney? No… but it sure helps!
Published as part of TIFF 2026 — Dispatch 4.
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