Mark Reviews Movies: RUN THIS TOWN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020

Rob Ford, the controversial mayor of Toronto from 2010 to 2014, gained a lot of coverage outside of the city and Canada for his brash personality, his lack of a personal filter, and his attacks on any news outlet that framed those things as a negative. Run This Town is a fictional chronicle of Ford's unofficial downfall, after it was revealed that he was addicted to drugs and alcohol, but the story is seen from the perspectives of a newspaper reporter and members of the mayor's staff.

The main distinction for all of these primary characters is that they're young—men and women in their 20s, just out of college and certain that only great things lie ahead of them. The world, though, is quick to hinder that kind of optimism.

One mostly understands the idea behind writer/director Ricky Tollman's decision to tell this story from this particular point of view. From its opening scene, in which the young assistants to the mayor and members of the city council are discussing a budgetary matter in the council chamber of city hall, the notion is apparent. Young people aren't just the future. They're the present, with their influence unknown, unseen, and unacknowledged.

Late in the movie, Kamal (Mena Massoud), the mayor's special assistant, says that, while he had an official title, his unofficial one was acting as the mayor. Bram (Ben Platt), a promising journalist, is stuck writing lists for a local newspaper's website, but he's the one who deals with a source who has video of the mayor smoking illegal narcotics. Ashley (Nina Dobrev), the administration's communications manager, has to spin her boss' harassing and sometimes abusive behavior, even as she becomes a target of it.

As for the mayor, he appears here, always called Rob and played by Damian Lewis—unrecognizable under a lot of waxy makeup. He's portrayed as a fake man-of-the-people, happy to meet with his constituents, because they mostly love the way he speaks his mind and sticks it to the "elite," but can't be bothered to do the actual work of, you know, governing. He claims to be a "normal guy," but he comes from wealth. His house is worth more than working-class families might make in a decade or more. It's kind of funny and mostly sad to watch this man portrayed now, remembering him as one of the early adopters of that faux populism that since has become the cornerstone of certain parts of contemporary politics.

Rob is the de facto target of Tollman's ire, not only for his inherent phoniness and the ways in which he abuses his power, but also because of the ways in which he dismisses and demeans the younger generation of people who are propping up his administration. Kamal, whose name the mayor pronounces as "camel," works to cover up his boss' misdeeds, even as Rob drunkenly insults, then desperately fawns over, and then goes back to insulting him. Ashley keeps the press off the trail of an incident in which the mayor groped a woman at a party, only to have him sexually harass her at the office.

As for Bram, he has dreams of becoming a legitimate journalist, but he's kept back by his editor David (Scott Speedman), who wants him to show his worth but never gives him an opportunity to do so, and the paper's editor-in-chief Judith (Jennifer Ehle), who's tough and ruthlessly pragmatic about the outlet's budget. Bram discovers that there's video of Rob smoking crack, and even though they know it would be a good story to bolster sales and online views, David and Judith keep his efforts to get that evidence on a short leash and scold him whenever he wrestles free of it.

All of this is thematically sound from a certain perspective, but Tollman also has a specific story, following a specific series of events, to tell. Within that framework, we catch glimpses of the underlying concepts here—how youthful optimism can be destroyed by the realities of the ways in which things work, how driven to succeed the next generation is within a system that looks down on them, how people dismiss or disregard young people at their own peril.

The framework of a real-life figure and scandal, though, gradually overtake these ideas and become the real story here. As a result, Tollman's observations become more scattershot, because the real Ford and this portrayal of the movie's Rob are targets too obvious to ignore. The way Rob plays the game of politics is familiarly disconcerting. The way that it's the drug and alcohol abuse, not the legitimate accusations of harassment and abuse toward women, that are his undoing says something important, too (as does a scene of a young man laughing at Rob's distasteful way of denying those accusations).

In trying to or simply falling into addressing so many issues, Run This Town loses its primary focus on its younger generation of characters, as well as how they specifically take part in and come to rebel against this world of politics. We can understand and even appreciate the idea, yes, but it eventually starts to feel as if the story itself doesn't fully support it.

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