Former PM takes it on the chin in satire

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This article was published 14/04/2011 (5643 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadian films don’t get much more Canadian than Mulroney: The Opera, a feature-length satire about Canada’s 18th prime minister.

The film, budgeted at just under $4 million, is filled with important Canadian characters (including Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Kim Campbell) and reproduces all the major events of the Mulroney regime.

Even so, the film’s director Larry Weinstein says the movie, which screens Saturday at 1 p.m. at Polo Park Silver City, will not be getting coverage from etalk, billed as “Canada’s most-watched entertainment news program.”

“They let us know last week that they will not be covering this,” Weinstein says on the phone from Toronto. “I don’t know why. We’re going to be on Canada AM so it’s not like CTV is ignoring us.”

Weinstein acknowledges the snub may be an attempt to avoid embarrassment for the show’s co-host Ben Mulroney, Brian’s son.

“I would have played with it,” Weinstein says. “I actually thought it would be really fun to do an interview with (actor) Rick Miller made up with prosthetics as Brian Mulroney in present day and let Ben interview him. I think it was short-sighted not to have fun with that.”

Certainly, Weinstein and company were intent on having fun with recent Canadian history. In particular, Mulroney presented himself as an ideal central character for an operatic treatment.

“The rise and fall of someone like Brian Mulroney is like a tragic opera. He was loved so much, but the Canadian electorate is so fickle,” he says, referring to the two majority governments Mulroney won before the Canadian voters finally ejected his party in 1993, reducing his 151-seat majority to two seats, leaving the Tories without official party status.

Working with librettist Dan Redican and composer Alexina Louie, Weinstein previously created nine short operas, eight of which were aired in 2005 on CBC as the Opening Night musical special Burnt Toast.

“They were all about relationships, and mundane everyday things, elevated to operatic level, and there was inherent humour in that kind of parody,” Weinstein says.

Conversely, Mulroney’s tale, filled as it is with triumph, hubris and scandal, made it more intrinsically operatic.

“It’s Shakespearean proportions,” Weinstein says. “It’s a huge rise and fall.”

Weinstein says he has heard rumblings in the blogosphere to the effect that the film is “some kind of lefty propaganda” deliberately released during an election in which the Stephen Harper’s Tories are gunning for a Mulroney-esque majority. Weinstein asserts the film has been in the works for the past five years, and anyway, no one is spared the satire.

“If you look at the film itself and the way the Liberals are treated, I don’t think John Turner comes off looking particularly good and the NDP don’t get a word in edgewise and (Pierre) Trudeau seems very conniving in this,” he says.

“Brian’s the star, but I think everyone is picked apart in this. I always thought that it was also making fun of the Canadian electorate as well, implicitly, and the media who were the bane of Mulroney’s existence… and would be the bane of Harper’s existence if he actually let them get close to him.”

As for the fact that one important Canadian media outlet is ignoring his film, Weinstein posits a possible reason.

“Maybe it’s because, in the opera, you hear (Mulroney’s wife) Mila refer to Ben as Benedict,” he says, laughing. “Most people don’t know his name is Benedict. I think maybe there’s some embarrassment there.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

 

Movie Preview

Mulroney: The Opera

PG

Saturday, 1 p.m.

Polo Park