‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney’ Review: Matthew Rankin’s Psychedelic Tour Through Mid-Century Canadian Conservative Politics

Sep 14, 2026 - 19:23

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‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney’ Review: Matthew Rankin’s Psychedelic Tour Through Mid-Century Canadian Conservative Politics

The Edmonton Journal described the 18th Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney as follows: “The eyes are Paul Newman blue. His hair has the swoop of the Robert Redford style and the voice the resonance of a Lorne Greene school of broadcasting. The jaw is by Gibraltar.” As hyperbolic as that commentary may read, those photogenic qualities made Mulroney uniquely well suited to television, which helped him ride an international wave of neoliberal fervor that also crested Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to political power. His punchy, slightly cornball charm, combined with a winning smile that neatly masked his Nixonian ambition, cemented Mulroney’s status as a modern Canadian politician, someone willing to lead the nation through the 1980s into an uncertain future.

On a basic level, Matthew Rankin’s quasi-documentary “Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney” charts the future MP’s rise to power, from his public failure at the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention to his “knockout blow” against Prime Minister John Turner in a televised debate. But as anyone familiar with his short film work, or his debut feature “The Twentieth Century,” knows, Rankin isn’t interested in neat narratives or bland retellings of political history. His film takes a collage approach to detailing Mulroney’s ascent and the developments of the Progressive Conservative party, cannibalizing hours of archival footage into a psychedelic (more accurately, sampledelic) vision of mid-1970s Canadian centre-right politics.

With its ping-pong-style associative editing, “Ladies and Gentlemen” frequently plays like the visual equivalent of an Avalanches song, or like the experience of watching a YouTube compilation of CPAC clips (for American readers: no, not that CPAC) under the influence of a heroic dose. However, Rankin’s creative gestalt extends beyond impressive curatorial instincts. His formal interventions into the archive, which run the gamut from fabricated period-accurate title cards and chintzy 16mm animation, elevate “Ladies and Gentlemen” to the level of phantasmagoria. The goal with Rankin’s gonzo history lesson is to collapse the gap between reality and invention until our eyes are permanently fixed upon their shared artifice. Cinematic pretense and the kinds political leaders and media personalities use to sell ideas are often one and the same.

As much as Rankin crafts his interpositions to fit the visual style of his archival inquiry, he also mines comedy from their deliberate incongruity. In the first ten minutes of “Ladies and Gentlemen,” which chronicles the ’76 leadership convention, he incorporates a fake expositional slideshow that offers background on the Progressive Conservative party—with cheeky, glowing neon slides featuring statements like, “People think Tories are cheap, angry sexually-frustrated bigots. Who can prove them wrong?”—and an animated image of Mulroney in an Elvis jumpsuit emerging from a Mach Five-style racer car. 40 minutes later, he brings viewers through a tour of “The Diefenbaker Museum of Progressive Conservative Achievement,” dedicated to the former PM John Diefenbaker, featuring such exhibits as his “partially-eaten sandwich” and a wing dedicated to the “brains of talented conservatives.”

Even moderately savvy viewers will likely know the relative veracity of the film’s images, but Rankin purposefully shifts between invoking the overtly unreal and providing a subtle touch to his satire. Examples include a winking nod to the Gracie Films logo over a title card that reads “This Episode is Presented by the Quebec Foundation for Solitude” featuring a man shushing, or a running joke of Rankin abruptly cutting off Ed Broadbent, leader of the centre-left New Democratic Party, mid-speech. Rankin also edits “Ladies and Gentlemen” with punchlines in mind, like when he cuts from a scene in which an interviewer confronts short-lived PM and Opposition Leader Joe Clark with his image problems as a “loser” with a title card that reads “Brought to you by the Alberta Federation of Anger: Promoting Western Alienation Since 1905.”

This review of “Ladies and Gentlemen” could easily just be a list of the best jokes. (My favorite: Joe Clark gives a speech where he says he’s “determined to make this a truly national party where we do not exclude people,” which is followed by a shot of an animated castle door labeled “The New Right” that opens on an image of a garishly colored Parliament member John Gamble as voiceover blares, “I have awakened a sleeping giant and instilled him with terrible resolve!”) The density of both Rankin’s style and his tour through history can be daunting for anyone generally unfamiliar with Canadian politics, such as myself. But his firmly comedic approach, primarily filtered through goofy ironic commentary in the tradition of Monty Python, makes the specificity of his survey go down smoothly.

Furthermore, Rankin’s refusal to render his film “accessible”—thematically, let alone commercially—genuinely impresses. He has made a film where it’s incumbent upon the audience to give themselves over to the material. For citizens of the Great White North conversant with 20th century politics, “Ladies and Gentlemen” presumably provides a great opportunity to remember some guys. (It’s also a good excuse to bask in hyper-precise nostalgia, like the presence of a talking pineapple puppet from the French-Canadian children’s series “Téléfrançais!”) For Americans, it offers us a chance to Google some guys with outstanding names, like Peter Pocklington and Allan Fotheringham, and marvel both at the differences between our government systems and the similarities in ideological bents.

Rankin admirably doesn’t volunteer a simple conclusion to take away from his third feature. Formally presented like a glitchy, trippy television broadcast “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is partly a critique of the medium itself, and how its particular production quirks and pop cultural influence dominated a more linear, pre-internet world. The film is also a study of Canadian conservatism before the country’s major political realignment in 1993 when the right-wing populist Reform party absorbed the Progressive Conservative’s authority. The conservatives in “Ladies and Gentlemen” professed the value of public institutions and social programs, environmental protections and cultural diversity, a far cry from the hyper-individualist, zealously intolerance of the movement today. Of course, Rankin also conveys how the glib centrism of the era, where “common-sense politics” tried to replace ideological principles, led to where we are today.

And then there’s Mulroney himself. “Ladies and Gentlemen” isn’t a hagiography of the man. Rankin doesn’t pull punches about his cunning opportunism and penchant for duplicity, not to mention the eerie slickness of his image (“the jaw that walks like a man” is how one pundit describes him) and the general incoherence of his positions. Yet, the film finds him an object of fascination, someone whose modest upbringing and outsider status made him an unlikely contender for the higher office. As Rankin moves through various historical subplots, like the preeminence of the Quebec sovereignty movement and the Progressive Conservative party’s pathological pattern of offering insipid, uninspiring candidates to oppose the country’s Liberal majority, Mulroney stands in the center, eager to impose his will on the nation.

“Ladies and Gentlemen” embraces the enigmatic interiority of the “Boy from Baie-Comeau,” offering no facile answers about the man himself. Yet, it’s Rankin’s distinctive style that guarantees his film will look, sound, and feel like no other this year. It will linger in the mind long after one’s interest in Brian Mulroney fades, if only because it resembles a fever dream so strange and vivid that disparate elements will infrequently return to the mind’s eye. It’s good to occasionally remember that politics can inspire that feeling in a positive way.