Rumours

by Mike McGranaghan

Twenty minutes into Rumours, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. About two minutes later, the first interesting thing happened. Something interesting and weird happened about twelve minutes after that. Then the weird stuff kept on coming. By the end, I was fully wrapped up in the film. It’s just that kind of deal. You have to be willing to accept that the early scenes are setting up dynamics that will pay off later on. Patience is the key here.

Directed by Canadian legend Guy Maddin in association with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, Rumours is a sophisticated comedy. If you like the obvious wackiness of Adam Sandler’s work, it won’t even remotely appeal to you. The comedic tone is more along the lines of Dr. Strangelove or The Death of Stalin, but with a weird sci-fi twist. I mean, it’s a satire of the G7, so not everyone is going to be on the picture’s wavelength.

The main characters are the members of the G7: the Chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett), the President of the United States (Charles Dance), the Prime Minister of Canada (Roy Dupuis), the President of France (Denis Ménochet), the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Nikki Amuka-Bird), the Prime Minister of Italy (Rolando Ravello), and the Prime Minister of Japan (Takehiro Hira). They’re in Germany to draft a policy statement regarding an unspecified global crisis. During the event, the group becomes lost in the woods, where they encounter masturbation-happy “bog bodies” – corpses that have been mummified in peat bogs – and a gigantic brain. Also floating around is the Secretary-General of the European Commission (Alicia Vikander), who seems to have amorous feelings for the brain.

Sounds pretty wacky, right? And it is – just not wacky in the way you might expect. The central joke is that these world leaders aren’t equipped to handle any kind of crisis. They’re ineffectual. Rather than playing the characters in a broad comedic manner that underlines their idiocy, Maddin and the Johnsons have the actors do everything completely straight. The characters in, for example, Grown-Ups or Anchorman are designed to say and do obviously comedic things. The G7 members in Rumours are not. They are serious people, put into bizarre situations which they approach with great seriousness. Dialogue in the picture never makes any obvious concessions to comedy. Humor instead springs from the ironically deadpan reactions of the group. The result is kind of like if Airplane! was directed by Werner Herzog.

One individual ends up getting hauled around in a wheelbarrow for most of the story. Interpersonal dramas abound, clearly designed to mimic tensions between nations. The Secretary-General hops on top of the giant brain at one point. This is the sort of madness that awaits viewers. Getting into the movie’s off-kilter groove takes some time, but once you’re there, you’re hooked. The story spins a web of bemusement that compensates for the lack of huge Farrelly brothers-type laughs.

All the actors do a fine job with the material, playing off each other to suggest various underlying feelings between their characters. In an increasingly complicated and scary world political scene, the movie’s portrayal of the G7 as inept is pointed, too. I can’t honestly say that Rumours is a comedy with high rewatch value. It is, however, enough of an odd duck to be entertaining.

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