The Twentieth Century: An improbable U.S. release for one of the most bizarre Canadian historical backward glances

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

Winnipegger Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century, which won the Toronto International Film Festival’s first feature prize in 2019, gets its US theatrical release today, a big moment for a film that is both deeply cultish and unavoidably Canadian. 

The subject is a Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. (The film was previously released in Canada but you can currently rent it via Vimeo.com.) Rankin’s treatment, combining Super-8 and 16-mm film, tinting, animation, puppets, cross-dressing performances, and theatrical sets, is a pyrotechnical tribute to a famously charisma-free bachelor politician.

PM William Lyon Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) indulges his boot fetish in The Twentieth Century

As was later discovered through his diaries though, King led, as biographer C.P. Stacey put it, A Very Double Life. That included compulsive paid sex in his early years, a nurse fetish, and later, seances, ostensibly communing with his dead mother through his dog.  As a character in a Robertson Davies’ novel notes, King is “the embodiment of Canada – cold and cautious on the outside, dowdy and fussy in every overt action, but inside a mass of intuition and dark intimations.”

In Rankin’s film, King is played by Dan Beirne as a rabbity young prig, with a stiff high collar and center-parted hair, who believes himself destined for leadership, despite his invalid mother and impecunious father. But Rankin is also a Canadian history student, and many of these episodes have some basis in fact. 

Those include King’s obsessive idealism of his mother (played here by Louis Negin as a frightfully domineering invalid). The devoutly religious young Mackenzie King was tormented by his sexual desires, though, here his visits to the demi-monde take a comic turn: He’s addicted to huffing stinky boots. In fact, erotic threats surround him, including of the self-administered sin: These occasions bring visits from the fierce Dr. Milton Wakefield (Kee Chan), the real name of a former Saskatchewan MPP) who orders treatment in his Onanist Sanitorium

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

The film is broken into 10 chapters, several of which have some parodic relationship to actual history, Rankin’s work bears the influence of his fellow Winnipeg surrealist film scavenger, Guy Maddin and The Twentieth Century’s chapters mark an  increasingly centrifugal spin from history to abstraction.  

We begin with young Willy at the Dominion School of Nationhood, based on the University of Toronto’s Kappa Alpha Society. The school is a breeding ground for young leaders, including another future Prime Minister, Arthur Meighen (portrayed as a crude rake by Brent Skagford), and handsome, doomed Henry Albert “Bertie” Harper (Mikhaïl Ahooja). The latter is based on King’s one-time roommate and  college friend who died young in a drowning accident.

In the Dominion School, future Canadian future leaders practice important leader skills, including Monty Python-ish twit competitions, in waiting your turn, ribbon cutting, and baby seal clubbing. They also train for be ideal Canadians, to “ask less than you deserve” and honour Canada’s pre-Maple Leaf flag, the Red Ensign, known as the “Flag of Disappointment.”

In many cases, the narrative has specific takes on increasingly fanciful and more nightmarish fantasies: Fascist speeches, unnerving sexual come-ons, simmerings of the history’s most cataclysmic century in its birth pangs. The character of Lord Muto (Seán Cullen), a name derived from real-life Lord Minto, stands for a representative of British bellicose imperialism, while the devoted Nurse Lapointe (Sarianne Cormier) offers a utopian Quebec nationalistic alternative.   King’s dream lover, Ruby Elliot (Catherine St-Laurent), an English harp-playing beauty and soldier, is his Aryan poster girl.

That core idea here, the pole in the middle of the merry-go-round, is that the stuffy, secretive King, as Robertson Davies suggests, is the embodiment of Canada’s locked-down colonial psychology. The Twentieth Century is a strange creation, though but there’s nothing unusual in the notion that Canadian blandness may be a form of camouflage.  Anyone who has read history, or for that matter, watched a hockey game, knows that.

The Twentieth Century. Written and directed by Mathew Rankin. Starring: Dan Beirne, Catherine St-Laurent, Mikhail Ahooja, Brent Skagford, Seán Cullen, Louis Negin, Sarianne Cormier and Kee Chan. The Twentieth Century can be rented via Vimeo on Demand at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thetwentiethcentury