Matthew Rankin's Brian Mulroney doc shows politician 'charming the whole country into oblivion'

Director Matthew Rankin poses for a photograph in Montreal, ahead of the screening of his latest film, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney," at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov

TORONTO — In 1990, Brian Mulroney’s upturned face was sculpted onto the languorous body of a swine, like one of Odysseus’s men transforming under Circe’s spell. The figurine’s gaping maw was carved into a coin slot, ready to gobble up Canadians’ hard-earned loonies and toonies.

So, director Matthew Rankin says, the former prime minister’s family has certainly seen worse than his new documentary, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney,” which premieres Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The piggy banks, attributed to Vancouver artist A.O. Pavlenko, still pop up for sale in online auctions every now and then. Someone sent a photo of one to Rankin recently.

“It’s totally vulgar. It’s completely awful and disturbing,” Rankin said on a recent video call from his Montreal home.

“But you know, satire at that time was really, really hardcore. Today it’s very gentle. It’s a very soft handshake kind of satire.”

If Rankin’s new film is a handshake, it comes with a pinch.

The documentary, Rankin’s followup to the Oscar-shortlisted “Universal Language,” presents a history of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party through the lens of Mulroney’s rise to power.

It takes place almost entirely before he was elected prime minister in 1984 — before Mulroney negotiated free trade with the United States or implemented the Goods and Services Tax (which was among the policies that led to the vitriol Mulroney faced later in his career).

The film uses thousands of archival video clips to construct a narrative as deftly as Mulroney crafted his political persona. Scenes from the 1976 PC leadership convention are interspersed with contemporaneous Canadiana: hot takes from moustachioed political commentators, TV interviews with Mulroney’s friends and rivals and even moments from “The Hilarious House of Frightenstein,” a campy kids’ show that ran from 1971 to ’74.

Mulroney lost that initial leadership bid to Joe Clark, who went on to become the shortest-serving elected prime minister. (Kim Campbell, Charles Tupper and John Turner — also a character in Rankin’s film — all served shorter terms, but they became prime minister after winning leadership contests, not elections.)

From there, Rankin portrays Mulroney as wielding his charm and cunning as both sword and shield, fighting his way up the Tory ranks.

“It’s like watching Fred Astaire or something,” Rankin said. “He’s so smooth — everything he says, every move he makes is perfect. He’s just charming the whole country into oblivion ... he was very skilled at the game of chess that is politics.”

This is the Mulroney Canada remembered upon his death in February 2024: the smooth-talking, Baie-Comeau-born Irishman known for his baritone voice and values-driven politics.

The later-career controversies were less-talked about. But the film shows Mulroney to be ruthless and “kind of duplicitous at times,” Rankin said.

None of this, he said, is a reflection of Mulroney as a person.

“It’s really about the construction of his image,” Rankin said. “It’s not exactly a biopic of the man. It’s more of a history of how that image was constructed and how that party transformed — how it sort of moved into its ultimate incarnation, which was Brian Mulroney.”

Television was crucial to that mythmaking, so Rankin played into its esthetic.

It’s a form the director has used in the past. In 2006, he and Walter Forsberg made “Kubasa in a Glass,” a 60-minute collage of the weirdest commercials Winnipeg had to offer between 1975 and 1993, and used that footage to create an argument about “what Winnipeg means,” Rankin said.

In this case, Rankin combed through Library and Archives Canada material and consulted with Ed Conroy, the man behind Retrontario.

“He, of course, has collected an enormous quantity of material, most of which is on warped VHS tape,” Rankin said. “And some of it is deaccessioned from defunct TV stations and has fallen into the mists of time.”

From there, it became a question of rights. In some cases, it was simple. He reached out to the creators of “The Hilarious House of Frightenstein,” who allowed him to use their material in exchange for a couple of National Film Board T-shirts. (The NFB produced the film.)

In other cases, it was a little trickier, Rankin said. It was unclear who owned the material in the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada’s archives, because that party ceased to exist in 2003, when it merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the current Conservative Party of Canada.

“A lot of it did come down to tracking down people who had produced the material and asking them if I could use it,” he said.

But he was able to work it out, and the result is a kaleidoscope of archival material.

“I asked the computer how many individual clips are on my hard drive, which is something like 20 terabytes,” Rankin said. “The computer told me that I have close to 80,000 individual pieces of film and video.”

After TIFF, the film is headed to the Atlantic International Film Festival in Halifax, Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival in northern Ontario, Lunenburg Doc Fest in Nova Scotia and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 14, 2026.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press