Midnight Madness! A Caped Canadian Prime Minister Stars In ‘Ladies And Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney’ – Toronto Film Festival

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, attended the opening of the Toronto Film Festival last year, helping introduce the documentary John Candy: I Like Me. This year, a former Canadian PM, Brian Mulroney, is appearing at TIFF, in a manner of speaking.

The Conservative Party politician, who served from 1984-1993, stars in Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, the rare documentary to be programmed in the festival’s Midnight Madness section. The outlandish tone suggests why it would be slotted in the midnight roster – the TIFF program describes Matthew Rankin’s film as “a satirical collage of archival footage, television nostalgia, and national mythmaking.”

One look at the key image will give a hint of what’s to come – it shows Mulroney in an outfit and pancake makeup that looks like a collision of Liberace and Count Dracula.

“In 1976, Brian Mulroney launched a charm offensive the likes of which Canada had never seen, dismantling the political establishment one dad joke at a time,” notes a film synopsis. “In this psychedelic doomscroll through the mind of a master politician, filmmaker Matthew Rankin charts the flamboyant rise of Canada’s 18th prime minister. From the backwoods of Baie-Comeau to the backrooms of power, Mulroney plots his ascent, trouncing his enemies with a smile and preparing Canada for the unlimited prosperity and permanent unity we live in today.”

Mulroney possessed a voice as deep as rumbling thunder and a jaw as wide as a dump truck. He came to power in Canada midway through the Reagan era south of the border, and there was a certain bonhomie between the two men who shared some ideological similarities (I went to college in Montreal while Mulroney was in office and distinctly remember seeing graffiti on a wall that suggested the artist’s discomfort with the political alignment of the leaders. The one-word scrawl read: Mulronnie.).

Alas, Mulroney (or Mulronnie, if you prefer) isn’t around to see his name in lights at the festival. He died in 2024 at the age of 84 in Palm Beach, FL, where many Canadian snowbirds are known to migrate. (Ironically, that’s also the Mar-a-Lago home of Donald Trump, a successor to Reagan who has declared a trade war on Canada).

“First of all,” Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin writes in a director’s statement, “I want to say that I think Brian Mulroney is completely amazing. This film is not the hagiography of blessed St-Brian-de-Baie-Comeau, but neither is it an ideological curb-stomping of the man. You can blame it on my Winnipeg upbringing perhaps, but I relate to the world through irony, and a skeptic has little to offer true believers. I am drawn to Mulroney because he was the prime minister when I was a kid and because of what he means as a cinematic phenomenon: I first understood him, as maybe most people did, as a character on television.  

“From the many thousands of hours of Mulroney-related news footage and propaganda I have sorted through emerges the full televisual force of an astoundingly charismatic and almost vengefully ambitious man, capable of being duplicitous and even ruthless (but hey, that’s politics), uniquely able to dance so effortlessly between Canada’s notoriously parochial two solitudes and, above all, an astonishing, brilliant political genius.”

He writes more. You can read it here.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is a production of the National Film Board of Canada. Rankin wrote, directed and edited the film. The producer is Pierre-Mathieu Fortin; executive producer is Pierre-Mathieu Fortin. Cinematography is by Alexandre Lampron; the original score is composed by Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney premieres Tuesday (Sept. 15) at Royal Alexandra Theatre at 12:59 p.m.