Politics Through a Broken Television

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MOVIE REVIEWS
Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney
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Genre: Documentary, Biography, Experimental, Satire
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Matthew Rankin
Writer: Matthew Rankin
Cast: Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, John Diefenbaker, René Lévesque, Lucien Bouchard, John Turner, Mila Mulroney, Maureen McTeer
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: Anyone hoping for a documentary in which historians act as talking heads and explain Brian Mulroney’s legacy in chronological order should probably check out what Matthew Rankin has made before walking into this one. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY takes the television presentation of Canada’s 18th prime minister, throws it into something resembling a malfunctioning video deck, and lets politics, propaganda, nostalgia, advertising, ambition, and national identity crash into each other for 105 minutes. Somehow, beneath all that deliberate chaos, Rankin manages to make a surprisingly coherent argument about the kind of politician Mulroney was and the country that helped create him.

Calling this a documentary feels both accurate and inadequate. Rankin is working with real speeches, broadcasts, interviews, campaign material, news footage, commercials, and other pieces of media history. All while having no interest in pretending an archive is neutral just because the images actually happened. Instead, he chops, layers, distorts, animates, reframes, and occasionally seems to bend the footage until watching history begins to feel suspiciously like remembering it.

That method is perfectly suited to Brian Mulroney because so much of his political power was inseparable from performance. Rankin's film begins well before the prime minister years, tracing the ambitious "Boy from Baie-Comeau" through the political world of the 1970s and toward the Progressive Conservative leadership struggles that would eventually put him in position to reshape Canadian politics. What becomes apparent isn't simply that Mulroney wanted power. Plenty of politicians do. He understood people, television cameras, and the usefulness of making someone feel as though the conversation belonged to them.

The documentary is fascinated by that ability without confusing fascination for worship. Mulroney can be charming here, and Rankin allows that charm to work rather than immediately interrupting it with someone explaining why we shouldn't be impressed. That's important because the political story makes considerably more sense once we understand why people were impressed in the first place.

The same generosity isn't extended to the mythology surrounding him. Rankin repeatedly pushes political imagery until it becomes ridiculous, building Mulroney into something between a politician, a folk hero, a television celebrity, a salesperson, and a product of the Canadian broadcasting system. The film can make his rise seem important and ridiculous within seconds of each other, which is considerably closer to the contradiction of politics than choosing only one interpretation.

Joe Clark becomes especially important within that story. The struggle over the Progressive Conservative Party gives Rankin a ready-made political drama, but he refuses to present it with the solemnity usually associated with historical documentaries. Conventions, speeches, whispered strategy, and television appearances become part of this enormous national performance where everyone is supposedly discussing ideas while also counting delegates and figuring out who can destroy whom without looking unpleasant on camera.

The humor is relentless, though it isn't always structured around the obvious. Sometimes Rankin simply repeats an image until its original meaning collapses. A line that reads as perfectly ordinary political rhetoric can be repeated enough times that it starts to sound deranged. Old television graphics, VHS scratches, animation, patriotic imagery, and fragments of cultural rubbish are treated with roughly equal importance, creating the sense that this history can't be separated from everything Canadians happened to be watching at the time.

That's probably the film's most obvious obstacle. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY is exhausting on purpose. Rankin wants sensory overload, and there are moments when his barrage of images, noises, edits, repeated phrases, distorted faces, and conflicting historical signals creates exactly the feeling he appears to be chasing. There are other stretches where I understood the technique well before the sequence was finished and found myself wishing the movie would give an idea another few seconds before burying it beneath the next ten.

A film presented through TIFF's Midnight Madness program almost seems required to have that kind of excess, and this may be one of the stranger documentaries ever placed there. The selection makes sense because Rankin isn't using documentary form as an excuse to become respectable. He approaches Canadian political history with the same willingness to distort the imagery that horror filmmakers bring to the screen.

The unusual part is that the chaos never overwhelms Mulroney himself. Through thousands upon thousands of fragments, a recognizable personality emerges. He’s extraordinarily ambitious, gifted as a speaker, calculating, funny, occasionally ruthless, and almost preternaturally aware of how he was being received. Whatever one thinks of his policies, his political skill is difficult to deny after watching him move through these rooms.

Rankin is particularly interested in the older Progressive Conservative world surrounding Mulroney. Looking backward from 2026 gives those politicians a strange distance, especially when their statements about public institutions, social programs, national unity, and environmental responsibility are compared with what conservative politics would become decades later. The film doesn't need to explain that history moved in a straight line from Mulroney to the present because, obviously, it didn't. What interests Rankin is the point of transition when an older political identity began to change into something else.

That makes the title's grandeur even funnier. "Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Mulroney" sounds like someone being introduced onto a nightclub stage rather than entering a country's history, and Rankin repeatedly treats politics as entertainment without arguing that it makes it meaningless; actually, quite the opposite. Being entertaining was part of Mulroney's politics.

Cameras recorded Mulroney, and he knew they were there. Campaign spots preserved political arguments, but they were designed to persuade. News broadcasts documented events while deciding which images and voices constituted the event in the first place. Rankin isn't uncovering some virtuous version of history beneath those layers; he's reminding us that the layers are part of the history.

The six-part structure gives the audience some desperately needed breaks. Without those divisions, Rankin's approach could easily become one long stream of political imagery, and the episodic organization allows the individual stages of Mulroney's development to take on their own character. Even then, the film demands attention in a way few political documentaries do because glancing away for thirty seconds could mean returning to an entirely different experience.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY earns its form. A straightforward rise-and-fall documentary could tell us what happened, and there would certainly be value in that. Rankin wants something messier. He wants to explore what Canadian politics looked like in real time, what it sounded like on television, and what happens when decades of those images are compressed into one overwhelming flow. I admired the experiment more than I enjoyed every second of the runtime. The sensory overload can become exactly that, and 105 minutes of Rankin refusing to settle into a normal documentary occasionally makes his strongest points fight for space with his latest joke. The excess is also inseparable from what makes the film memorable.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY doesn't resurrect its subject to deliver a verdict. It resurrects the world that made him, then keeps rewinding the tape until charisma starts looking like strategy, strategy starts looking like entertainment, and entertainment starts looking suspiciously like political history. For a movie about a Canadian prime minister, it's wonderfully strange!

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[photo courtesy of NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA (NFB)]

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