'Rumours' Is an Off-Kilter Satire Stuffed with A-List Talent

Many films cast great actors in positions of power, conflating their dramatic prestige with a tangible and confident sense of statesmanship. It’s rare for a main cast to consist entirely of leaders of sovereign nations, but a film like Rumours can’t lampoon the po-faced affirmations of progress and unity that fill our airwaves (while the planet burns) without asking respectable and commanding actors to make world leaders look incredibly silly as they scramble to respond to a global threat.

Check out this insane line-up: Cate Blanchett (Disclaimer) is the chancellor of Germany; Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) is the President of the United States; Takehiro Hira (Shōgun) is the Prime Minister of Japan; Nikki Amuka-Bird (Persuasion) is the Prime Minister of Great Britain; Denis Ménochet (Monsieur Spade) is the President of France. It’s a formidable line-up of people who project both measured authority and grace but are just as capable of ironic self-derision. 

Take Blanchett, the film’s biggest star – she’s arguably as well-known for her snarky, snippy, and ironic roles in Blue Jasmine, Tár, and that one hysterical Today Show interview with Sarah Paulson and Hoda Kotb than her purely dramatic roles like Elizabeth, Notes on a Scandal, or The Aviator. 

Together with a top-knot sporting zaddy Canadian Prime Minister (Roy Dupuis) going through an emotional crisis and the nebbish, cured meat smuggling Italian Premier (Rolando Ravello), these G7 summit leaders huddle under the shade of a gazebo in a luxurious country estate to draft a declarative statement about a new, vague emergency – until a supernatural and apocalypse-tinged event leaves them stranded without any of their powers of state, with only zombified “bog bodies” and a giant forest-dwelling brain for company.

If you’re not clued up on the design and purpose of the G7, Rumours gives us a brief catch-up in its opening moments. The G stands for “Group of,” and since the 70s, it’s gathered seven foremost industrialized country leaders (Canada joined after the first summit) to address individual and international concerns affecting the shared capitalist world, culminating in a drafted statement that (hopefully) all leaders will agree to sign. If this description makes the G7 summits sound like another excuse for performative, public-facing glad-handing from liberal democracies who are far more interested in asserting their right to belong in the forum rather than curing the world’s gravest ills, you’d be correct, but that doesn’t stop it from being a big event whenever it’s held.

Canadian writer-directors Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson, and Evan Johnson have collaborated on tons of strange, surprising, and satirical work that can be traced back to Maddin’s trail-blazing tenure in the Winnipeg Film Group, an artist-run collective based in the city where all three were born. Their head-scratching, film-scratchy work, such as The Forbidden Room, Stump the Guesser, and The Green Fog, is packed with rebellious, vibrant distortions and perplexing comedic diversions – but the explosive, corrosive look of Maddin’s earlier, acclaimed films mainly absent in Rumours. 

The world leaders are framed in attractive but unremarkable compositions, and even the phantasmagorical colors and mists surrounding them later in the film seem to lack Maddin et al.’s usual arresting visual panache. This leaves a lot on the shoulders of our actors and the comedy they’re entrusted with, and thankfully, Blanchett is not the only astute comedian in the cast. (Her mastery of German-accented English amuses the most, especially when she casually suggests sampling from a horrific and inappropriate German theater monologue for the G7 statement.) 

As President Edison Wolcott, Dance pulls off an impressively senile performance (which may make you wince more than once, considering the past year of presidential news coverage). Ménochet delights as he’s carted about in a wheelbarrow and babbles about the historical symbolism of what’s happening, an unsubtle but charming way that the directors dispel fears that this is all some carefully manufactured political allegory. 

Not all the recognizable faces are utilized well; playing the Swedish Secretary-General of the European Commission, Alicia Vikander (Firebrand) feels like she’s been given a role that could have been cut before the cameras roll; she doesn’t make a convincing case for getting her back into big lead roles, stat, either.

As is only fitting for a film helmed by such Capital-C Canadians, Rumours is most concrete when it centers on the lovelorn Canadian Prime Minister, whose inner angst, insecurities, and hang-ups remain on the forefront of his mind throughout the gag-a-minute gazebo conference and later in the leaders’ journey through surreal wood. Dupuis melodramatic ability to huff and puff like James Dean, if he were an elected official, is made funnier by the fact that he is so good-looking – a broad, built, and pristinely groomed man who lends Rumours a perplexing, sincere emotional presence among the stifling bureaucrats. 

Performances like these are like a guiding light in Rumours; it’s full of off-kilter hijinks that could use the uniformity of form and material that Maddin’s prior work (My Winnipeg, Brand on the Brain) had in spades. It’s an appreciably accessible effort from Maddin and the Johnson brothers, but that accessibility shouldn’t have meant compromising what we come to their films for.

Rumours is currently in limited release in U.S. theaters and is expected to be available on streaming before the end of 2024.