Of Truth and Nonsense: Matthew Rankin's The Twentieth Century Review

I hate to say it, but sometimes being an ignorant American can really pay off. Going into Matthew Rankin's debut film The Twentieth Century (2020), I blindly and wholeheartedly embraced it as an artistic fever dream without even batting an eye. With its slick spray painted art deco edges, equally jagged Weimar-era impressionistic sets, sardonic to gross out sense of humor, and a neon color palette to rival Tron, it never crossed my mind that I was watching anything other than dazzling visuals and total nonsense. Heck, our hapless wannabe-politician main character is named William Lyon Mackenzie King—surely, this is a work of fiction, she assured herself in the third person.

We first meet Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) as he puts in some quick face time with the dead and dying orphans of Toronto as part of his political campaign. You see, King has known his entire life that he would become the Prime Minister of Canada because that is what his domineering and bed-ridden mother (Louis Negin) raised him to do. When she’s not berating her French home nurse Ms. Lapointe (Sarianne Cormier) or her milquetoast house husband (Richard Jutras), she’s painting visions of what’s to come for her darling boy–mainly predictions of grandeur and beautiful blonde ladies playing harps. When that very blonde lady, the one in the portrait he has hung over his bed, shows up in the orphanage playing a trumpe—er, harp as golden as her hair, Mackenzie is floored. But Ruby Elliott (Catherine St-Laurent) dismisses his overtures, unimpressed by his political ambitions; she has no need to marry a Prime Minister wannabe when she’s already the daughter of Lord Muto (Sean Cullen), the sinister Governor General of Canada, feared by all and beloved by law.

That is just the first fifteen minutes though, I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff. First there’s the Prime Minister trials, featuring feats of strength, ribbon cutting and extremely bloody baby seal clubbing (puppets, but still comically disturbing). Then there’s Ms. Lapointe’s defection to the cult-like Quebecois side of opposition leader J. Israël Tarte (Annie St-Pierre), as well as the mysterious appearances of one Dr. Wakefield (Kee Chan) and his magical and menacing cacti. Never mind Mackenzie’s deep, dark, shameful sexual secret that causes mysterious and frothy fluids to erupt from all sorts of unexpected places. The Twentieth Century is almost indescribable in its dedication to bombarding you with bizarre details at every angled turn—not to mention its school play-esque anything goes casting choices.

The closest I can get to describing the experience of watching this film is to say it’s like if Guy Madden and Ken Russell discovered a portal to the 1920s while playing playing laser tag against Monty Python’s animations. Art director Dany Boivin has already won numerous awards for this film and I’m ready to start up my own one-person campaign to peer pressure the rest of the industry into giving him more. Beyond being visually stunning in its perfect mix of openly handmade practical and digital effects, the lore that gets built up in this Bizarro Canada is also a delight from start to finish; whether we’re navigating the zigzag paths of ice and the seedy dungeon tunnels of Winnipeg or witnessing a marriage ritual where the betrothed walks blindfolded on an ice flow, guided only by the scent of her true love’s sapling across the rapids.

When the film ended, I found myself appreciating how satisfying it felt to, after such a wild and stressful year, just enjoy an hour and a half of solid nonsense. How refreshing to watch a film that made me feel like a kid watching cartoons again—blissfully content to just accept whatever was in front of my eyes, enjoying the manic humor, the impossible scenarios and the overall visual feast. The thing is, if I had spent more than five seconds reading the movie’s description, I would have realized that The Twentieth Century is in fact a biopic. William Lyon Mackenzie King was indeed the 10th Prime Minister of Canada, and he served from the mid 1930s to the late 1940s.

Oh.
Uh, well, that complicates things.

Granted, from what I can tell, the real Prime Minister King was nowhere near as sublimely ridiculous as our film’s protagonist. If anything, King is seemingly best known for his lack of people skills and charisma above all else. But speaking from experience, you don’t really need to do much homework about the real man to grasp something in the film other than its aesthetics. Where I can't comment with any authority on McKenzie's legacy, The Twentieth Century’s themes of being stuck under unsatisfactory leadership that, through fear and personal moral failings, holds a nation hostage is fairly recognizable. That the minority leadership in power alongside said terror, flanked on both sides by passionate and bolder political leadership urging them to act, rallies only as far as to ineffectively hold the needle directly in the middle, leaving the country in stasis, is a message that certainly resonates across borders. With our Mackenzie born out of a selfish desire for power and blind faith in himself, it’s no surprise that, after years of failing upward, he has no real practical ideas for what to do when he actually makes it to the top.

More than its political commentary, the nuances of which I’m sure I’m missing out on as a dumb American, I have to applaud The Twentieth Century more in its subversions of the generic biopic formula. Instead of rehashing a legacy of bland events, a generic outline of events that maps out an upward slope to success and subsequent downward slope of decline, the film instead attempts to impress upon us its subject's humanity—and true human nature is, of course, impossible to chart in a predictable shape. It’s an approach Ken Russell mastered decades earlier with his classical musical biopics such as The Music Lovers or Mahler, biopics that tell the story of accomplishment through sensational visual metaphor and exploration of the main subject’s emotional landscape. (Deja vu, this is also the second time I've made a reference to these films while discussing a 2020 biopic). What the real Prime Minister King did or did not accomplish is not nearly as interesting as painting a portrait of his truth by personifying his emotional extremes through expressionism.

Director Rankin even said the biggest influence on him to create this film was through his experience reading the real Mckenzie King's diary while in university. For Rankin it was an eye opening moment, realizing that this looming historical figure was in fact just as insecure and uncertain about his life decisions as anybody else; “I was really amazed by how maudlin, how hypersensitive and confused and bewildered and panic-stricken the diary was. It reminded me of my own! I felt this connection to this very vulnerable, very private space.” This sort of exploration of a person’s inner space and emotional vulnerability is not just what’s lacking in the traditional Hollywood biopic formula, but also in how we view and teach history outside of higher education. We tend to remember and immortalize the statute, a legacy edges smoothed out in cold bronze, while discarding the more nuanced and unflattering details. We need more public reconsidering of our historical heroes, whose names and faces we take for granted as street names and illustrations on money, as the messy, selfish, insecure, brilliantly stupid human beings they were.

I had a very similar epiphany as Rankin did in college myself when reading Rousseau’s letters to Voltaire in regards to the infamous earthquake in Lisbon. I'd encourage anybody to do a quick google search if you want a real laugh—in your mind you picture these towering figures carved out of marble, spewing perfectly formed documents as easy as they exhaled. In reality, Rousseau slams Voltaire in an open letter that comes across more as a bad op-ed, or even a snarky quote tweet, whining that Voltaire's existential poem made him, gosh, feel bad about the thousands that died in this great tragedy. Boo hoo, Voltaire’s pessimistic view left no room for smug satisfaction at what Rousseau previously felt was divine retribution being meted out to a city of deserving sinners. While there’s obviously more nuance and context to the matter, at the time history never felt more knowable and alive to me than it did in this public mud-slinging pontification spat over a global tragedy which neither was physically involved in.

When you’re trying to summarize a man’s life in less than two hours time, it’s obviously imperative that you make some cuts to detail and choose a topic to focus on. In The Twentieth Century, Rankin chooses to smooth over the facts of a timeline to celebrate, instead, the man’s emotions; a concept so often ignored for the opposite option that the experience becomes almost surreal by default. But who’s to say a man furiously masturbating into a used shoe he stole from a female coal miner on an iceberg isn’t the truer portrait of moderate political ineptitude than showcasing a checklist of underwhelming political accomplishments? There’s a much finer line between truth and nonsense than most want to admit.

Plus, nonsense has more narwhals.

The Twentieth Century is out now on VOD and select theaters through Oscilloscope Productions.