I have only vacationed in Canada once, taking a brief road trip to Toronto by way of Windsor. We had apparently picked the wrong time to do this, as the country’s relations with the US was at a low, as result of a trade dispute. Having always heard how polite Canucks are, I was stunned by how rude everybody was to us. Some people went out of their way to be rude, which I rarely encounter, even here in the colonies. I started wondering if I had somehow driven to France.
At least the states hadn’t started an all-out war on the great white north, which is what drives the plot of 1995 comedy Canadian Bacon. Alan Alda is a peace-loving US president whose policies have resulted in the closure of a arms manufacturer that employs most of the residents of Niagara Falls. Having run out of enemies, he and his cabinet decide to stage a phony war with Canada just to give the economy and Alda’s poll numbers a boost. So glad this movie is satire, as the US would never invade a country under false pretenses. *cough*
Things are going well for the bogus war except for the heroics of the Niagara Falls sheriff, played by John Candy in his last role. The economy in his town is so bad that he and his deputy (played by Rhea Perlman in one of the few times I have seen her without husband Danny Devito) try to fish the corpses of jumpers out of the water. They get $50 a corpse, but only $25 if they successfully discourage a potential suicide, so they are always at the base of the falls’ observation platform yelling, “JUMP! JUMP!”
In the beginning, we see once such attempted suicide, in an inspired performance from Kevin J. O’Connor. This is an actor that tends to play unbalanced personalities. Here, he reminded me of Bill the Cat from the comic strip Bloom County, though I’d be hard-pressed to explain why. We first see him trying to drive his sad little car off the observation deck of the falls, except parts keep falling out of it along the way. The front bumper barely nudges the railing as it coasts to a stop. The determined O’Connor had wrapped himself up in duct tape, so he wriggles out of the car and tries to jump the railing, only for a loose end of tape to get caught on it, which leaves him suspended like a human yo-yo.
O’Connor is a friend of Candy and Perlman so, together with Bill Nunn, they band together to fight the imagined Canadian menace. First, they accidentally foil the destruction of the power plant, as attempted by US operatives posing as a Canuck strike force. Next, they sneak across the water to that other country to commit the highest offense of that land: littering. They manage to escape while two Mounties civilly discuss whether the warning one of them had given was grammatically correct. Our heroes fail to notice they left Perlman behind, where she will embark on a second storyline where she essentially turns into Rambo and becomes obsessed with destroying the CN Tower.
Worried the fake war with Canada might escalate into a real one, the US military tries to stop these assorted nutjobs from causing further damage. One bit I liked involves the Omega Force, which appears to be the country’s most elite fighting squad. I laughed hard when one of the White House staffers points out Geneva Convention forbids the Omega Force from being used against Caucasians.
It is moments like that which show this is a film by Michael Moore. This movie is worth seeing not just because it is John Candy’s last role, but because it is Moore’s only non-documentary film. A lot of his sensibilities are demonstrated here, though the humor is far more gentle than that in his other works.
Much of the humor is at the expense of the US, though always in contrast to Canada. There’s this exchange when Candy and company invade the country: “Are you sure we’re in Canada?” “Do you smell anything? No? Then we’re in Canada!”. Then there’s their effortless ability to overtake a power station there: “There’s not a locked door in the whole country.”
Some very welcome cameos round out the experience. Steven Wright appears as a Mountie chief in the laconic style for which he’s known. Dan Ackroyd has a great bit as a motorcycle cop who pulls over a vehicle covered in anti-Canadian slogans and makes Candy add French translations to them, so as to observe the country’s dual-language regulations.
Canadian Bacon deserves to have a larger audience than it has so far. I wouldn’t say it warrants a cult following, but it is much funnier than its reputation (or lack thereof) would have me believe.
Dir: Michael Moore
Starring John Candy, Alan Alda, Rhea Perlman
Watched on blu-ray