Millennial focus misplaced in fictionalized Ford story

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This article was published 18/04/2020 (2334 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford could be viewed in many different ways: a canny civic politician, a crude populist buffoon, even a tragic substance-abuser who wanted to be loved.

But in this unexpected and odd movie from writer-director Ricky Tollman, the late mayor serves as… the locus of millennial discontent.

It’s a point strained to the maximum, but Tollman does have one.

The film is set in 2013, as Ford was coming into an epic behavioural meltdown. Tollman shifts his focus between two young Torontonians trying to make inroads into careers. Bram Shriver (Ben Platt) has used some family connection to get a job with a Toronto newspaper, The Record. (There is no such paper in reality.) There, his hard-bitten boss (Scott Speedman) assigns him a neverending cycle of listicles, including the 10 Best Hotdogs in Toronto.

Meanwhile, over at Toronto City Hall, Kamal Arafa (Mena Massoud, last seen in the title role of the Disney remake of Aladdin) is an assistant to Mayor Rob Ford (Damian Lewis, sporting an abundance of latex fat). Kamal — his name is inevitably pronounced “Camel” by his boss — is explaining the role of press assistant to new hire Ashley Pollock (Nina Dobrev), a newly minted lawyer toiling in a low-paying job beneath beneath her skill set. Kamal’s advice is: Avoid the press at all cost.

That becomes difficult as word leaks of a video showing Ford smoking from a crack pipe with some sketchy friends. Because Bram has been at work “reverse-engineering” the mayor’s social media accounts, he pursues leads to find the video. Simultaneously, Kamal embarks on his own quest to suppress it. That becomes more difficult in the face of the mayor’s abusive behaviour, which culminates in a drunken episode at City Hall, where Ford turns his lecherous attentions on Ashley, and Kamal fails to stop it.

It must be reiterated that this version of events is heavily fictionalized. Bram is a bumbling stand-in for the altogether more successful investigative reporter Robyn Doolittle, who broke the story for the Toronto Star.

On Twitter, Doolittle slammed the filmmaker’s choice to make the protagonist a male reporter and she has a point, one that is made that much sharper when you see how Dobrev’s character is diminished in her victimhood, while Platt and Massoud grab most of the focus. (Between Dobrev and Jennifer Ehle’s frosty editor in chief, one can surmise Tollman is out of his comfort zone writing for women.)

The movie’s time shifts are more confusing than clever. And though the latex makeup and fat suit seem designed more for a comic performance, Lewis manages to transmit Ford’s menace and his pathos. (His distress about the crack video being made public is poignantly fixated on losing his coaching position for a junior football team.)

While their characters are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to transparency, both Platt and Massoud manage to elicit some sympathy. And, indeed, winning sympathy is the point for Tollman, who gives both his actors a chance to soliloquize about the plight of young people spinning their wheels in thankless careers while their elders can bull their way through life with little consequence or accountability.

It’s a valid point, one that could be made in a more focused story. But the implications of Rob Ford’s life and career loom so much bigger than just that.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing