SORT OF BASED ON A TRUE STORY // A FILM REVIEW OF "THE TWENTIETH CENTURY"
If throughout the years you have seen biopic after biopic and wondered, "Where is the William Lyon Mackenzie King story that I have been desperately seeking for so long," then you're in luck, because THE TWENTIETH CENTURY has arrived! Also, if you're looking for the life story of William Lyon Mackenzie King, you are also most definitely Canadian, as the tenth Prime Minister of Canada is not exactly a household name. Director/Writer Matthew Rankin hasn't really crafted a biopic in the traditional sense. Instead, he's made what feels like a fever dream, a dream you might have had about The Prime Minister the night before your paper on him was due and you were home sick with the flu. If that sounds like a bizarre set up, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Shot and delivered in a broad, silent film meets Monty Python style, THE TWENTIETH CENTURY tells a fictional version of King's life and turns it on its head. Sure, he eventually lead his country through WWII, but he also was quite a polarizing figure. He was very cold, never marrying, kept his religious beliefs a secret but entrusted mediums and séances for advice on his political plays. He also had a baffling view on The Great Depression and once said of Hitler, though he didn't agree with Nazism, "(he) will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people." Yikes. So it's easy to see why Rankin has chosen to lampoon him and what a glorious job he does.
The film tells King's story (played hilariously inept by Dan Beirne) in 1899, not with exact facts but more like facts twisted through a dream. His bed ridden mother (Louis Negin) has foretold his future: He will be the next Prime Minster of Canada. He sees himself as a great man who stops in to visit a dying child every day, even though he promises to make tuberculous "illegal" and only off handedly gives her a handkerchief when she's coughing up blood, too preoccupied with the vision of Ruby Eliott (Catherine St-Laurent) playing the harp in the distance. His mother has also foretold this part of his future. He will end up with Miss Eliott and he's always known that, since a painting of her has hung above his bed since he was a boy.
He also has a deep shame around his own sexual turn on: a foot fetish. So his madman doctor tries to help cure him of it by placing and alarm on his genitals. Characters are altered here from their real life counterparts and form variations or altered versions of them. For example, Dr. Wakefield (Kee Chang), King's madman doctor in the film, is inspired by John Harvey Kellogg and his supposed plan for making an anti-masturbation cereal.
After a bizarre and hilarious leadership contest, which includes things like getting points for being passive aggressive, endure tickling and churning butter, the golden child Bert Harper (Mikhaïl Ahooja) becomes PM instead of him and he ties for second place. Even worse, Harper ends up with Ruby. Worse yet, Bert is aggressively nice and it's very hard to dislike him. King becomes fed up with the entire system and decides to run away with his mother's ex-Nurse Lapointe (Sarianne Cormier), who's infatuated with him. Once the word comes down however that he may become Prime Minister after all, he leaves her behind, floating on a piece of ice (that old situation) to go for the dream of being PM. Being the life of King, smooth sailing from here on out is not in the forecast.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is 1,000% Canadian and delightfully absurd. Even if half of the jokes or references go over your head, as long as you give into the absurdity, you'll very much enjoy yourself. Beirne is wonderful as King, but so is the rest of the ensemble cast, each chewing scenery and nailing the coming timing of joke after joke. It's also a brutal pill to swallow, as the takedowns get darker and darker. Sure, lines like "Canada is just one failed orgasm after another" will elicit pure laughs, but when one tyrant says, "Give the people hope and there will be endless disappointment, but fill them with nightmares, and they will follow you straight into hell" dips into the darker shade of life. It all works fantastically well, both hilarious and horrific, and immediately Rankin's film feels like it's already been stamped as a cult movie classic.
GRADE: B+
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Matthew Rankin STARRING Dan Beirne, Sarianne Cormier, Catherine St-Laurent, Mikhaïl Ahooja, Sean Cullen, Trevor Anderson, Kee Chang, Louis Negin. Opening in select theatres and in Digital Cinemas November 20th. For more information: https://thetwentiethcentury.oscilloscope.net/