Ricky Tollman

(On Cable TV, August 2020) The strange fever dream of Rob Ford’s tenure as Toronto’s mayor was bound to make the leap to the movies at one point or another, and if Run this Town is the first, it’s probably not going to be the last nor the best. Set in a particularly depressing version of our reality where journalism is fighting for survival through top-ten lists, the film tells us how a plucky young journalist ends up uncovering proof of Ford’s drug abuse while mayor—alongside worse improprieties such as being drunk and abusive toward his staff. It’s a nice underdog story… except that even cursory observers of the Ford story know that’s not how it happened, and how the real story was certainly not quite as clear-cut and easily translatable to a three-act screenplay format. Run this Town does have its moments—The actions and ideals of the journalists are opposed to the spinning tricks of the mayor’s equally young staff, and how they manage to keep Ford’s issues out of the news through cheap appeals to populism. The cynical take on modern journalism is enough to make anyone despair for the future of the country, and writer-director Ricky Tollman’s approach to the material, often using split screen, does have a modern, quasi-anarchistic approach. The film wears a dispiriting colour palette like an attitude, and its cynicism can be overbearing at times, especially when the film goes on an extended rant boldly taking on the kind of anti-Millennial prejudice that only idiots really believe. But the worst sin here is blatantly inventing a character rather than being able to tell us the real story with the real people involved—including, problematically enough, replacing a female journalist with a male intern. It’s highly possible that we’re still not distant enough from the story to be able to tell it properly—Ford may be dead (explaining why he’s the only named real character here, played with caricatural villainy by Damian Lewis) but many of the other people involved aren’t, and the rights to journalist Robyn Doolittle’s book have been sold for a competing project. Ultimately, it’s also true that the real story of Rob Ford may be unstoryable—involving too many people with a small part of the story, and not featuring any movie-worthy dramatic moments. Run this Town can be interesting in dramatizing the real events, but it’s also annoying in that it takes far too many liberties along the way.