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 zeroes 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 ...