Really, the CBC’s Jack Layton biopic has little right being as watchable as it is. Produced by the company behind halfway-laughable TV events like Wrath Of Grapes: The Don Cherry Story and a Céline Dion movie, and released so soon after Layton’s passing (it aired last night), Jack could easily be accused of being opportunistic, even downright tacky. So while it may be a matter of lowered expectations being surpassed, Jack is actually pretty OK.
Jack follows Layton (Rick Roberts) on the 2011 campaign trail that saw the NDP establish themselves as Canada’s official opposition, and flashing back to scenes of him as a shit-kicking Toronto city councilor, activist, and hapless wooer of Olivia Chow (Sook-Yin Lee). It’s a blushing piece of postmortem portraiture, for the most part, painting an orange-hued picture of Layton as man fighting to do what’s right. Yet it never hedges on the idea that Layton is something other than a politician.
The Canadian hard right (i.e. Ezra Levant and co.) liked to snark that Layton was “Saint Jack,” especially in the wake of the pricy state funeral that followed Layton’s death, and all the hagiography that glowed around it. But like a savvy NDP supporter – or the countless other Canadians who seemed to just genuinely like Layton, regardless of party membership – Jack doesn’t regard Layton as some sort of centre-left messiah. Throughout the film’s 90 minutes, members of the press and adversaries alike attempt to knock Layton on his back foot by accusing him of being a “politician,” i.e. using speeches, rallies and highly public displays to bring issues to the attention of Canadians.
It was always the most ludicrous insult flung at Layton during his life (kind of like accusing a chef of being chef and expecting it to mean something). And as Jack shows, Layton and his NDP were perfectly aware that their tactics could be perceived as “stunts.” It even shows the cane Layton carried during the last leg of the 2011 being transformed into from a literal into a figurative prop: an icon of NDP supporters, signifying the party’s own against-all-odds gains.
The most naïve of us may like to believe that such exacting planning and workshopping is not the work of politics, as if politics were somehow something pure and unsullied and real. But that’s a ludicrous delusion, precisely the sort of doe-eyed strawman the right lobbed softballs at when they attempted to deride Layton for being what he never denied he was: a politician. In the face of hyper-cynical political TV like House Of Cards and Veep – which treat politics as if it’s just wheeling and dealing – Jack illuminates the balance between the ideology of politics, and the involved PR campaigns that makes them palatable to the electorate.
Plenty of things niggle about Jack. There’s all the heavy-handed exposition, which has characters clumsily introducing themselves and their roles in order to get all the work of identifying them out of the way (“Olivia Chow, school trustee,” “He’s the president of the party,” “Not as long as I’m chief of staff!” and so on). There’s also all the cheesy courtship stuff between Layton and Chow, which overloads Jack’s slim running time by threading a love story through a more compelling narrative of Layton’s political life.
Though, to be fair, all the mushy stuff does serve up some of the film’s most memorable moments: Layton’s flirty pickup line “You haven’t told me how you can like Kierkegaard more than Hegel” a bike crash that rivals the scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure where Paul Ruebens flips ass-over-teakettle off his two-wheeler and maybe the most Canadian snatch of politely romantic dialogue ever heard on broadcast TV – Layton’s “Thank you for marrying me,” followed by Chow’s demure, “You’re welcome.”
It may possess all the depth of a commemorative coin, and never really gives Layton’s political enemies a proper run at Saint Jack – though Sun News commentator Charles Adler appears as a radio host giving a younger Layton the gears for his bleeding heart policies earlier in the film. But Jack is well acted, neatly structured and tender without feeling like an unscrupulous attempt to seize on the raw public emotion toward the former NDP leader. It’s a fitting, and at times stirring, tribute. Way better than some rink-a-dink road over by the Don Jail.
