Movie Review: Run This Town

Run This Town ** / *****

Directed by: Ricky Tollman.

Written by: Ricky Tollman.

Starring: Ben Platt (Bram), Mena Massoud (Kamal), Damian Lewis (Rob), Nina Dobrev (Ashley), Scott Speedman (David), Jennifer Ehle (Judith), Gil Bellows (Detective Lowey), Lauren Collins (Sammi), David Eisner (Phil), Hamza Haq (Detective Sharma), Kathryn Greenwood (Jill), Emmanuel Kabongo (Abe), Rebecca Liddiard (Claire), Araya Mengesha (Joshua), Katy Breier (Lauren), Seamus Patterson (Zach), Setta Keshishian (Gidda).

 

When telling an infamous, true life story, there are always multiple different approaches you can take – making the story we know front and centre, approaching for the side, having it be background noise, etc. As long the narrative you are telling works, then the approach does not really matter. Yet, how the filmmakers behind Run This Town decided to tackle the Rob Ford crack smoking tape scandal, and turn it into a treatise on millennial entitlement is a complete and total mystery. Worse, it’s not even a good treatise on millennial entitlement. Then you throw Damian Lewis in a fat suit/makeup so unconvincing that you think it must be a joke doing an accent that doesn’t sound like, well, anyone and Run This Town ends up pretty much being a train wreck of a movie. One that is entertaining in fits and starts – and has an interesting idea thrown in once in a while to keep things interesting.

 

The story of Rob Ford as Toronto’s Mayor is a fascinating one – a populist in the Trump mold before Trump was a politician, Ford deeply divided Torontonians in terms of his popularity. There were always sketchy things about his past and his alcoholism wasn’t really a secret. The existence of a crack tape – which is exactly what you think it is, Rob Ford, sitting around with some young men smoking crack, was rumored before it was seen – and when it finally did break – courtesy of a Toronto Star reporter named Robyn Doolittle, it made Ford into an international laughingstock – and ended his career. He died not long after leaving office.

 

Writer/director Ricky Tollman, strangely, decides to tell this story through the lens of two, fictional millennial men. The first is Bram (Ben Platt) – a child of privilege, graduated from University, but still living at home, who gets a job at a news site and wants to be a real reporter – but is basically assigned to write listicles. The one other job at the paper he has is trying to construct Ford’s schedule – which his staff has stopped giving reporters – out of the information he has, This leads him to getting the lead on the crack tape – it basically falls into his lap. And he screws it up. The other major character is Kamal (Mena Massoud), the young “Special Assistant” to Rob Ford, whose job it is to basically lie to the press, and run interference on all of Ford’s many (many) scandals – protecting his boss, who is nice to his face, but whose supporters feed off his dog whistle language to attack people like Kamal. The major subplot involves Ashley (Nina Dobrev), a young lawyer/PR person on Ford’s staff, who he harasses in front of everyone – and is angry that no one else seems to notice or care.

 

It is strange that a scandal broken by a Toronto newspaper, by a competent female reporter, who end up being a story pursued at another paper by an incompetent male reporter. Having said that, I don’t think Tollman is really trying to diminish what Doolittle did – she isn’t featured in the movie, but her work is – as Bram finds himself constantly scooped on what he thinks of as “his” story – basically because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s odd though that instead of focusing on a character like Doolittle, we have Kamel. I kind of understand the point here. Kamal is the opposite of Bram is many ways – someone who doesn’t have the same advantages, who has had to earn his way up through the ranks, and is good at his job. Yet, by the end, he’s in essentially the same spot as Bram – but worse, since he doesn’t have his family money to fall back on. The movie is trying to show these different aspects of being a millennial – the perilous economic uncertainty, etc. – but it doesn’t really do it much better than we’ve seen elsewhere, and it’s an odd choice of story to use as a jumping off point.

 

Now the elephant in the room – and that’s Damian Lewis as Ford himself. The movie probably would have been better making one of two other decisions – the first being doing what Kitty Green did in The Assistant with her Weinstein-inspired character, and never showing him at all – have him be a absent presence, or the other really making him a full character. They don’t really do either here. Lewis is essentially playing a cartoon character here – the fat suit, and accompanying makeup, look ridiculous, his accent sounds nothing like Ford’s – or any Canadian’s really. And he attempts to play Ford basically as a pathetic, almost comical character – but one who can turn in an instant into an angry, violent man. But he doesn’t pull it off – or really come close. The movie makes some interesting decisions on when to deploy Ford in the film as well – so for instance, we do see his harassment of Ashley, and the infamous press conference moment of “I have more than enough to eat at home” – but we don’t see the crack tape at all. It’s an oddly disjointed character in a film that doesn’t really seem all that interested in Ford at all.

 

I remain convinced that a movie about Rob Ford could be great – hell, he was an interesting enough presence that you could make several, with different tones, different perspectives, and they would probably all work. It just kind of seems likes Tollman and company found one of the only ways to not make this story work.