Matthew Rankin Turns Brian Mulroney Into a Fever Dream

Matthew Rankin's not interested in a straight biography. His new film Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney — premiering in Toronto — takes the former Canadian PM's climb to power and scrambles it into pure visual chaos: archival clips, animation, old TV spots all mashed together like someone's fever dream about mid-century politics.

Rankin's built a rep for taking conventional stories and bending them sideways. Universal Language showed he could do that with character. Here, he's doing it with an entire country's political mythology. Mulroney's ascent becomes less a documentary and more a collage — which honestly might be the realest way to understand how power actually moves, all propaganda and noise and half-remembered footage bleeding into each other.

It's the kind of project that only a director with real vision swings for. Whether it lands as brilliant or too obtuse probably depends on your patience for form over narrative. But at least Rankin's asking real questions about how we mythologize our leaders instead of just reciting dates and quotes.

Read the full story at The Hollywood Reporter → https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/matthew-rankin-film-ladies-and-gentlemen-brian-mulroney-chat-1236683600/