I knew nothing of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford before seeing this film. His many controversies and scandals about drugs and sexual harassment during his 2010-2014 tenure somehow never penetrated my sphere, despite making international news and even appearing on talk shows.
That is to say I had no context for the depiction of the nonfiction elements of writer-director Ricky Tollman's Run This Town until later doing my own research on the real-life events that serve as its basis. I found that my post-watch research didn't really enhance or detract from my experience, or even re-contextualize the film in a new way... and I think that may be the problem: Run This Town doesn't seem to offer much of a comment on its subject, beyond the obvious.
The film focuses on a number of young adults in close proximity to Ford's 2013 video scandal. Each of them is fictional, likely based on one or more real-life people. Kamal (Mena Massoud) is a sharp and efficient Special Assistant to Mayor Ford (Damian Lewis), fresh out of law school, where he honed his ability to verbally destroy an opponent on any issue. Now, he verbally destroys anyone who threatens his source of income: the mayor, who brutishly refers to him as "Camel." Ashley (Nina Dobrev) is another member of Ford's staff who has helped Kamal defuse various would-be scandals born out of Ford's drunken stupors and nightclub appearances. Amidst these coverups, Ashley is unaware that she will soon become another woman that Ford and his staff attempt to "bury" in order to protect his public appearance.
Meanwhile, Bram (Ben Platt) is a talented but inexperienced newspaper journalist who yearns for a more potent story than the "top 10" lists he writes on a regular basis. When a mysterious source asks to meet Bram in a public location to reveal information he has about the mayor, Bram becomes embroiled in the frustrating and competitive process of trying to break the news of what would become Ford's most well-known scandal.
The main characters and their actors mostly carry their own, but Lewis' Ford is an exception—he doesn't look, sound, or behave anything like the footage I've seen of the real life Ford. The aloofness is there, sure, but this portrayal of is a cartoon—a bumbling, waddling gorilla of a man who can barely speak full sentences or comprehend what anyone else says to him. My impression of the real Ford is not that he was intellectually brilliant or even particularly wise, but he does strike me as a fully conscious, amiable person who could carry a conversation. Lewis' performance, or perhaps the way his character is written, is, at the very least, hyperbolic, bordering on absurdist parody.
The film is aesthetically very similar to other "uncovering the scandal" films like Bombshell, Spotlight, and The Post, leaning into common style choices of the subgenre: multi-pane montage transitions, snappy dialogue, nonlinear storytelling, and an "artful" rendering of a mundane office setting. But Run This Town lacks the sense of revelation at work in the best of the genre, or even any of the aforementioned films.
The first scene features a debate among Ford's staff regarding how public funds ought to be allocated, and it's made clear in their sassy discussions and ultimate decision that these characters have built (or are building) their careers on bullshitting, and bullshitting very well. It's also in this sequence that we become acquainted with Tollman's Sorkin-esque writing style; each character speaks with a silver tongue, with a rapid-fire delivery that seems poised to fire back immediately against any verbal affront. This shows Tollman's penchant for funny and clever dialogue, while also exposing a weakness that plagues even Sorkin's scripts: when everyone is a quick-footed smartass, the characters begin to bleed together and lack real human personalities.
But more significantly, those early minutes of Run This Town set up the rest to fail. From the beginning, the film tells us point-blank that everyone who works for Mayor Ford is probably at least kind of a shitty person—if not for their own values or behaviors, then for those of others, whom they will bullshit and bury people for to protect. Where, then, is the surprise in the rest of film? I suppose one could argue that with proper historical context (which I did not have until after the film), there is no surprise to begin with, and that the complaint is moot.
But the issue is that even if I, the viewer, am not surprised by the events that unfold, the characters ought to be, and their surprise ought to feel genuine. What Run This Town gives us are a set of characters who know the kind of person they work for, and they revel in it... until that person's behavior becomes too much for them to keep a lid on. When Kamal, Ashley, and others are forced to face the fact that they've been putting makeup on a cockroach for a living, it feels hollow and obvious. I felt similarly about Bombshell, but at least most of the characters in that film were ignorant—willfully or innocently so—of their boss's abhorrent behavior. Here, there's no lesson learned or deeper truth exposed; simply a series of events played out exactly the way they seemed they would (and, in fact, did).
Bram's separate, parallel arc revolves less around the revelation that Ford is a creep and more around the conflict between journalism as a cause and as a business. But again, little is discovered in its musings on how much to offer an anonymous source for a big scoop, or who deserves to fill a seat during pitch meetings. Magazines are businesses much like anything else; that much is true, and, again, that much is obvious.
Run This Town is stylish enough, and Tollman makes some impressively veteran choices with pacing, blocking, and editing. But the lack of new insights or perspectives on the film's topic leave it feeling somewhat impotent. I'd be interested to see Tollman direct someone else's script, or at least write one that isn't beholden to telling a true story that has, in essence, been told many times over by now.
Run This Town seems to be a case of a real-life story being interesting enough for real life, but not interesting enough for cinema. That's not to say that one can't make any story interesting on-screen if it is written and directed well enough—anything is possible in film. But if one is opting for a story based on real events, one might want to make sure that the editorialized elements—characters, commentary, action—make for an interesting enough tale to be told on their own, just in case the true facts aren't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ5un9TJbq8&w=585