The Twentieth Century

illiam Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s tenth and longest-serving prime minister, is an emblem of our nation’s repressed, ineffectual masculinity. A staunch centrist and bureaucrat, Mackenzie King accomplished little during his 22 years in office: his main contributions were his ability to win elections despite his apparent lack of charisma, and his power to maintain “Canadian unity” through “liberal corporatism,” the sort of waffling, lukewarm sentiment that continues to define Canada’s political consensus. But underneath Mackenzie King’s veneer of cold professionalism and unwavering rationality, there was a strange, disturbed, petulant soul; his nickname, the result of inconvenient posthumous revelations, fits him well: “Wacky Willy.” It is likely this duality that attracted Winnipeg’s (which won the Best First Canadian Feature award at TIFF) presents its Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) as a power-hungry, momma-loving bachelor, a bickering, self-absorbed mercenary, and an ignoramus blindly guided by divine revelations and libidinal anxieties.