Surreal ‘biopic’ of former PM delivers deadpan delights

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This article was published 10/01/2020 (2489 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A fabulist take on the formative years of William Lyon Mackenzie King, The Twentieth Century premièred at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, where it screened in the Midnight Madness program and took home the Best Canadian First Feature Film award.

How a movie about an influential Canadian prime minister might end up in the Midnight Madness slot rather than the Dull, Dutiful Drama category is all down to Winnipeg-raised, Quebec-based filmmaker Matthew Rankin, who rightfully describes this highly stylized, deliriously kinky historical comedy as a “Canadian Heritage Minute from hell.”

Combining dream-like sets, animated sequences and surreal comic bits, the film is audacious, artificial and sharply satirical, saying as much about the 21st century as the 20th. Though an introductory title card confidently declares that Mackenzie King has been chosen by Destiny (with a capital “D”), this bizarro biopic consistently eschews nationalist triumphalism for the much more Canadian modes of humiliation, disappointment and lowered expectations.

Accordingly, Willie (Dan Beirne) is shown as round-shouldered, mother-dominated and sexually repressed. His aspirations to upstanding Canadian manhood, not to mention his ambitious attempts to overcome his sneering political nemesis Arthur Meighen (Brent Skagford), are constantly undermined by wavering self-confidence and an inconvenient fetish for women’s boots.

Teetering on the edge of comic caricature, Beirne still manages to sneak in some poignancy. His Willie can be apple-cheeked and gormless, pompous and stiff, occasionally even sinister and sneaky, but he’s somehow appealing all the way.

“I only ever meant to be moderate and inoffensive,” he says plaintively at one point, the Canadian hero’s lament.

Rankin himself is neither moderate nor inoffensive, and his cinematic excesses are wonderfully entertaining. Employing Freudianism so deliberately fevered it becomes parodic, Rankin shows Willie visiting the bisected home of his parents. His feckless, apron-wearing father (Richard Jutras) — perhaps a reference to the old-school Oedipal anxieties of Rebel Without a Cause — is relegated to the ground floor, while a locked room on the second floor houses Willy’s tyrannically overbearing mother, played by veteran Guy Maddin actor Louis Negin, whose craggy face and beribboned gold curls combine for a bit of grotesquerie straight out of Hagsploitation classics like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.

The young Mackenzie King also takes part in a multipart competition for Canadian leadership that involves such quintessentially Canuck feats as tree sniffing, waiting your turn and Whac-a-Mole-style baby seal clubbing.

Meanwhile, between bouts of shoe-huffing, he lusts for the aristocratic governor-general’s daughter (Catherine St-Laurent), his heavenly, harp-playing anglophile ideal, while simultaneously engaging in an on-again-off-again dalliance with his mother’s much-put-upon, bedpan-scrubbing French-Canadian nurse (Sarianne Cormier).

Basically, Rankin turns 20th-century nation-building into a comically doomed love triangle, with English Canada mooning over aloof, oblivious Britain, while spurning the honest affections of Quebec. Winnipeg also makes a brief appearance as a hellscape of weirdness, depravity and discount furniture. (We think Rankin’s joshing. Mostly.)

There is, as with so many Winnipeg filmmakers, the almost inevitable influence of Maddin, along with riffs on German Expressionism, totalitarian propaganda, absurdist comedy, fanciful silhouette animation, ’60s hard-edged abstraction, ’50s melodrama and The Wizard of Oz.

These factors are all fused into their own Rankinesque thing, however, with lots of low-fi high style and arch, deadpan comic tone. You can trace a line from Rankin’s early days in Winnipeg, crafting tragicomic Peg-centric mythologies, through later short works like Mynarsky Death Plummet and The Tesla World Light, right up to this feature-length project.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, The Twentieth Century is not really a biopic at all — though actual historical facts do pop up, like the heads of those unfortunate baby seals, in unexpected places. Rather it’s a cinematic statement that all biopics — especially earnest middlebrow ones — are in some sense false and futile.

Still, if Rankin is having some fun with our 10th prime minister, he does have true and serious things to say about what it means to be Canadian. “Do more than your duty and expect less than your right,” our nation’s politicians jingoistically demand in The Twentieth Century.

Rankin seems to be suggesting that, as Canadians, we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for more from our leaders — and maybe our film industry, too.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca