Canadian Bacon - Mid-90's Preview of Today

my rating:

Canadian Bacon was on TV this weekend, and I hadn't seen it when it came out, so I recorded it. It was John Candy's last film, and activist film-maker Michael Moore's only non-documentary to date. So it's not exactly grade-A material. But it's good for a few laughs, and some bittersweet ironic foreshadowing.

The film is about an unpopular president (Alan Alda) starting a cold war with Canada to boost the military industry and his approval ratings. Candy (in a nice bit of ironic casting, as he's from Toronto) plays the sheriff of Niagara County NY and recently-laid-off munitions factory worker, who responds to the U.S. government's anti-Canadian propaganda by organising his friends into an inept militia that manages to turn up the heat between the two countries.

The parts I enjoyed the most were the good-natured jokes about Canada, such as poking fun of U.S. stereotypes about how "nice" Canada is, or the "alarming" fact that 90% of their population lives along the U.S./Canadian border, or the obvious danger their tendency toward socialism (free education, free health care, etc.) represents. As a beer lover, I loved the way hostilities began over Candy's character saying that Canadian beer sucks... because it's such an ignornantly false accusation (especially comparing Molson or Labatt to 1995-vintage U.S. brews). Michael Moore grew up a short drive from the bridge to Sarnia, Ontario, so he knows his "enemy" well. (And of course Candy was there to help.) Certainly no one connected to Hollywood would have understood Canada well enough to lampoon the perceptions of border-state Americans about our neighbor to the north.

Of course Moore had more on his mind than cross-cultural gags, and the script is loaded with criticisms of American industrial leaders, American political leaders, and the American sheep who allow themselves to be victimized and lead astray by them. While the references to American invulnerability no longer hold up, much of the rest of the film is prescient about what would happen since it came out.

A shot of a pickup truck flying a 6-foot U.S. flag was satire in 1995; it's an everyday reality today. And listening to the president's advisors talk about how Americans need to feel like their life is threatened before they'll go to war, and the need to manufacture such a fear of Canada... well, it's not too difficult to imagine such a conversation leading to the story Bush invented tying Saddam Hussein to terrorists targetting U.S. soil.

"There's a time to think, and there's a time to act. And this, gentlemen, is no time to think!" says Candy's character at one point. Sound like any presidents you've heard talk lately?