REVIEW: ‘Run This Town’ chases the wrong part of the Rob Ford story
Damian Lewis as Rob Ford and Mena Massoud as Kamal in Run This Town, directed by Ricky Tollman.
If you followed Canadian politics in the spring of 2013, you’ll remember the main question being asked was, “Does a guy like Rob Ford deserve to be mayor of Canada’s biggest city?” People tried to weigh the pros and cons. Ford was a populist, promising to stick his neck out for the little guy, and made a mission of personally visiting people who called his office with complaints about potholes and other minor issues. But he also publicly struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse, and reports swirled of racist rants, sexual harassment, and a general sense of chaos at city hall.
From lowly citizens of Toronto to American late-night hosts and cable news anchors, discussion of Ford’s antics was everywhere. But the question that no one was asking was, “What’s it like to be a millennial reporter or political staffer caught up in the churn?” Despite the cinematic potential of the core Ford question, the query that the new film Run This Town wants to follow is the one about the young professionals.
It’s not a bad idea on paper, but Ricky Tollman’s film doesn’t have the depth to do any of its characters justice. It presents a political staffer (Mena Massoud) who believes he’s the de-facto mayor without giving any evidence; a greenhorn reporter (Ben Platt) who’s supposed to be seen as entitled and bad at his job, but is somehow the film’s hero (?); and a depiction of Ford (Homeland and Billions star Damian Lewis) that lingers on his monstrous behaviour, excising much of the warmth and good intentions that complicated voters’ feelings towards him.
Lewis is not glimpsed in character for an asphyxiating amount of time. Tollman seems to want to save his reveal like Spielberg teased the shark from Jaws. In the meantime, instead of building a tense cat-and-mouse game between Bram (Platt) and the people protecting Ford, the characters stay in their own bubbles, never crossing paths or ever giving the sense that they’re doing anything to outmaneuver each other. There’s even a few ballsy references to All the President’s Men, including an attempted millennial subversion of the parking garage scenes, but all this does is highlight how deeply Run This Town sits in the shadow of Alan Pakula’s movie.
Ben Platt as Bram, in a split diopter shot evoking All the President’s Men.
In an interview, Tollman claimed that the point of this was to avoid minimizing the work of the real-life reporters who covered the story. So we’re offered the also-ran tale of Bram, a recent journalism school grad living with a parental safety net, who assumes he’s owed the chance to cover Ford because he won a writing prize at school. This would be a fine B- or C-plot in a bigger, more expansive movie about Ford, but it’s really hard to root for Bram when his efforts are the spine of the movie. The same goes for Ford’s aides, who open the film by showing off how geeky they are about municipal policy, but who don’t turn out to be nearly as skilled or manipulative as the movie wants us to think.
At the risk of sounding petty, the film’s budget also makes itself known. Scenes at City Hall and the paper where Bram works are in desperate need of extras and better staging. The movie makes it feel like the city has emptied due to some catastrophe - the lights are always dimmed, and there’s no sign of the wild press scrums that took over the mayor’s office, at least until the very end of the movie, with a recreation of the infamous “I’ve got more than enough to eat at home” remarks. You come away feeling more like it’s a stage play conducted by a small community theatre company, or that there’s a better political thriller happening just around the corner, whenever Lewis is offscreen.
As it stands, Run This Town will remain as a curiosity. To date, it’s the only quasi-mainstream movie about the Ford saga, or even of any Canadian political scandal. The participation of rising stars like Platt and Massoud, and the supporting work by Golden Globe winner Lewis gives it a boost that made-for-Canadian-TV adaptations wouldn’t have, but the screenplay just isn’t up to the task. Anyone who remembers Ford’s tenure as mayor wants a movie that examines the actions of the real people involved, not a fictional side-universe with Ford as the sea monster living off the edge of the map.
Run This Town gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
The prosthetics used to make Lewis look like Ford are a little extreme; they muffle Lewis’s performance and exaggerate his physique.
A smarter tactic for a scaled-down sidecar story would be to build it around the #MeToo experience of Nina Dobrev’s character, Ashley.
The orange subtitles used when Massoud’s character is speaking to his grandmother are kind of obnoxious.