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The Guardian
11 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Mayor of Mayhem review – a jaw-dropping look at a crack-smoking politician who opened the floodgates
I am surprised at how often 2013 feels like a lifetime ago, in political terms at least. That was the year the late Rob Ford, then mayor of Toronto, was reported to have been filmed smoking crack cocaine. He denied it, twisting the allegations into what he suggested was a smear campaign by an untrustworthy, left-leaning mainstream media. A few months later, the city's chief of police, Bill Blair, held a press conference in which he announced that the police had the video in question, and it showed Ford smoking a glass pipe. The mayor was defiant. 'I have no reason to resign,' he said. He didn't. Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem manages to squash the chaos of Ford's many scandals into an appropriately hectic 49 minutes of documentary. (The fact that the police reporting the existence of a crack pipe video is only one of these scandals is telling: a reporter here vividly likens the number of controversies surrounding Ford to 'sweat off a runner'.) It provides a brief account of his entry into politics, and viewers with an interest in the psyche of 'controversial' politicians will be amazed and astonished to learn that, like Donald Trump, Ford was probably motivated by wanting to impress his tough millionaire businessman father, who had been a bellicose politician himself. Ford won Toronto's mayoral race by a landslide in 2010. He was straight-talking, rightwing, and positioned himself as being on the outside of a wasteful and excessively bureaucratic system; he was appealing, says one observer, to both 'bankers and bus drivers'. There were initial reports of earlier controversies, yet to blossom into full-blown scandals: prior drug- and alcohol-related arrests, accounts of him disappearing from official duties to coach a local high school football team. They rippled to the surface and dissipated quickly. Ford said he was only human, and his supporters lapped it up. By 2013, however, reporters and journalists began to hear more stories. Ford's chief of staff, Mark Towhey, recalls a military gala where Ford arrived dishevelled and inebriated, eventually getting Towhey in a headlock. It opened the floodgates to reports of the existence of the first crack-pipe video. The subsequent circus of controversy and chaos turned Ford into an international figure, and, many argue, a punchline. Even so, half of Toronto's residents still thought the video had been fabricated. Towhey says that when he confronted his boss about it, he was troubled that Ford said, 'There is no video,' rather than, 'I didn't do it.' Reporters and staff members recall their time in the Ford family whirlwind with varying degrees of amusement, exasperation and even fondness. It is this cocktail of reactions that makes the story so tempting to view as a model for the populist wave to come. It is easy to transpose Ford's tactics on to Trump's electoral successes, for example. He sowed the seeds of doubt when it came to institutions offering checks and balances on his power. He bamboozled observers, supporters and detractors by repeatedly transgressing boundaries. All of this made it difficult for the electorate to know what to believe. This version of politics as spectacle, no matter what it is that the spectacle is comprised of, has become mainstream in many western nations. There's no such thing as bad publicity, indeed. The tragedy of this zippy documentary is that what was shocking back in 2013 has become relatively ordinary. Ford is shown repeatedly jostling with crowds of reporters. He makes outrageous statements. He admits to smoking crack, and blames being in a 'drunken stupor' for his poor decisions. Still, he doesn't resign. The idea of a public becoming numb to boundary-busting behaviour is floated, very briefly, though there is nowhere near enough time to get into the thick of it. Neither is there space to address the fact that, while this is a story of politics, it is also a story about drugs and alcohol and addiction. At the end, there is the briefest suggestion that Ford had a good side and a bad side, and that he did good, and bad, things for the city. It feels tacked on and trite, and the opportunity to go further is thrown away. But this is jaw-dropping, and provocative, and a reminder of how certain parts of the western world got to where we are. The first Trainwreck, in 2022, was about the horrors of the Woodstock 99 music festival, which descended into a soup of greed, violence and riots. It used its three episodes wisely. Mayor of Mayhem is a frantic, surface retelling of a much more complex, and much more intriguing, story. Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem is on Netflix now.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem – this shameless, crack-smoking politician's life makes for car-crash TV
Canadians make bad decisions too. For proof, see this schadenfreude-fuelled documentary about Rob Ford, the bellicose former conservative mayor of Toronto. Ford's rolling scandals in office include public drunkenness, smoking crack with gun-runners, and lying about everything. Talking heads in the documentary, sensitively titled Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem (Netflix, from Tuesday 17 June), remember him as 'an everyman … without a shred of credibility … who turned city hall into a circus'. That seems unfair. Circuses aren't that bad, and I refuse to believe every man smokes crack cocaine. Most documentaries wring every ounce of lurid detail from their subjects. This guy has more chaos than fits inside 49 minutes. We do get thrillingly grainy footage of him twirling his crack pipe, slurring first-degree murder threats with Mortal Kombat-levels of specificity, and making bizarre rants in Jamaican patois, against what or whom I'm not sure. First-hand sources are film-maker's gold, and Ford is happy enough to spend his lowest points around people who video everything. These people never have good phones though, do they? There isn't space to do more than mention Ford's extensive legal and domestic troubles, nor critique his executive choices, which included voting against grant money for HIV programmes, removing bike lanes and declaring transit workers an emergency service so they couldn't strike. In one council meeting, Ford reportedly stated: 'Those oriental people work like dogs.' He later apologised for the remark, which he had intended as a compliment. Shamelessness and emotional dysregulation are fantastic traits for reality TV; at some point they became necessary for public office too. Trainwreck feels like a rear-view mirror on that turning point. Ford swings between joking around, puce-faced outrage and meek apology. He resembles a baby, which makes strange sense. If it's unfair to attack appearance, let's just say he was a voluptuous blond, and voters in the western world have a type. It is impossible to imagine a woman or an ethnic minority candidate getting away with one of the bad decisions Ford compulsively makes. Those folks can't even wear tan. The story – and our glee in watching it – is complicated by the fact that Ford is a casualty of addiction issues. The question of who, how and when we forgive is a live one. Does it make a difference if the wrongdoer demands we move on, as Ford does? His popularity remained high. He would have been re-elected but in 2014, was diagnosed with an aggressive abdominal tumour and died in 2016. That same year Trump was elected president. There's a sick familiarity to the way controversies bounce off the Canadian mayor. The way he demonises the media as liars when he knows another scandal is about to break. The way he is able to position himself as a victim, and voters eat it up. There is an attempt at balance. 'I'm proud to show this side of the story, and … why I stood by him through thick and thin,' says his former head of security. The Rob-Ford-was-a-good-man argument here hinges upon a story we're told about a time the mayor was buying himself a Subway sandwich. Upon learning there was another order waiting but no driver, Ford delivered the stranger's sub himself. Doesn't make him Nelson Mandela, does it? By his own reckoning he made $35 plus three bucks as tip. Why does he have that much time in the day? Trainwreck shows Ford going door to door, asking people if their fridge freezers are working correctly, and taking a water-jet to graffiti. That's not governing; that's being a handyman. We all need to be more serious about public office. While politics will always be about public perception, it shouldn't be reduced to entertainment, and ideally should be distinguishable from true crime. Otherwise the only winner is social media clips and documentaries. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion No point pretending it isn't watchable, though. I was gripped by this grainy footage, of a mayor fighting the public, or ploughing into an elderly female councillor, while barrelling across the chamber floor in a state of agitation. He might have been on his way to the Speaker's podium, to rip off his shirt and yell: 'Are you not entertained?' I was. I'm not proud of it.
