REALITY WAS WORSE
This fictionalized Rob Ford story fails to capture all the sheer lunacy
I’m not one to brazenly reveal the end of a movie, but I’m making an exception with Run This Town. Here are its last words: “While this story is inspired by actual events, certain characters, characterizations, incidents, locations and dialogue were fictionalized or invented for the purposes of dramatization.”
You can say that again. Perhaps it’s a function of having lived through the events of this movie — that would be the raucous, good-ol’-boy mayoralty of Rob Ford, whose frequent public drunkenness, racism and crack cocaine use put Toronto on the world map like nothing since SARS — but Run This Town seems to dance around the issues, failing to capture the sheer lunacy of those four long years.
The choice of first-time writer-director Ricky Tollman is to focus on several junior City Hall staffers and one young journalist at a fictional newspaper called The Record, although in fact there were two reporters from the very real Toronto Star on the case of the crack cocaine video, and the younger one was not the sad sack played by Ben Platt, but a driven female Ryerson graduate, Robyn Doolittle.
Another bizarre casting choice was getting Damian Lewis to play Ford. The British actor is (the internet semi-reliably informs
me) six feet tall and 190 pounds. Not scrawny, but hardly the hefty dimensions of Ford during his tenure. So they’ve encased him in a fat suit, with the unfortunate result that it now looks like a costumed Mike Myers is running the city. (Some voters would no doubt have preferred that.)
The rest of the cast feels lost in Ford’s shadow. They include Aladdin’s Mena Massoud as Kamal, special assistant to the mayor; and Nina Dobrev as his friend and co-worker Ashley.
We also get Scott Speedman and Jennifer Ehle as editors at The Record. Clearly they were instructed to play their characters as nasty, egotistical, sarcastic jerks. I’ve worked a long time in the newspaper industry and can testify that only 40 per cent of editors are like that. (Note to my editors: The last line contains a typo and should read “10 per cent.”)
The film touches on some real events, like the time a drunken Ford brought prostitutes to visit his City Hall digs, or his reaction to being fired as a football coach, which seemed to trouble him more than the notion that he might also get booted from office. Then there’s the news conference that ended with him telling reporters: “I’ve got more than enough to eat at home.” (The full context makes this remark, um, jaw-dropping.)
But Run This Town never captures the bonkers nature of the 2010-14 Toronto mayor, from his drunken public appearances to his ranting in Jamaican Creole and his plan for a downtown monorail. Not to mention the much darker incidents of reported domestic abuse, the shooting death of gang member Anthony Smith and the bizarre spectacle of a sitting mayor having to deny allegations he was somehow involved in that. In many ways, Torontonians were primed for the antics of the next U.S. president years before anyone else.
Tollman has said he wasn’t making a factual story, but you don’t write a film about a Toronto mayor named Rob Ford and then get to play the fiction card. And yes, I admit I’m perhaps too close to the actual events to view the film dispassionately. But even as pure entertainment, Run This Town comes up short. As a record of one of the weirder moments in the city’s history, it does Toronto a disservice. Heck, it does Ford a disservice. He died in 2016, and we should remember him in all his human frailty and antic glory.