Tommy Can You Hear Me?

Michael Therriault plays the title role in Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story. Photo Allan Feildel.

When Kiefer Sutherland withdrew in late 2004 from the CBC miniseries Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, the production lost thousands of prospective viewers. Money couldn’t buy the publicity value of having reigning TV action star — 24’s Jack Bauer — play his granddad, our publicly acclaimed “Greatest Canadian.” 

The actor could not schedule the biopic around his hit Fox series, apparently. Still, the shattered stuntcasting dream of having Sutherland involved in the project probably worked to the miniseries’ advantage. For although he has a very real talent for playing reluctant heavies, it is impossible to imagine Sutherland, with his shambling jock’s bulk and sandpaper baritone, standing in for the quicksilver elf who was Tommy Douglas.

How, for instance, could Sutherland capture his grandfather’s maiden parliamentary speech, when the 5’5” politician rose to address the assembly, only to have an opponent snicker, “Stand up!” “It has been requested that I stand up,” Douglas sang, smiling through raucous laughter, before moving in for the kill: “I am now at my full height, which is not very imposing. Fortunately, there are houses of debate where measurement is from the shoulders up, rather than from the shoulders down.”

The sequence is one of many winning moments in filmmaker John N. Smith’s (The Boys of St. Vincent) deeply felt portrait of North America’s first socialist government leader, the five-time premier of Saskatchewan (1944-61), then inaugural head of the federal New Democratic Party (1961-71). And the scene, indeed the entire two-part, four-hour production, works because we buy into and enjoy newcomer Michael Therriault, a 33-year-old Stratford-trained actor, as the populist firebrand.

The Toronto performer captures Douglas from his Depression-era days as a slyly clowning Baptist minister in Weyburn, on through deadly confrontations with strikebreaking thugs as a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) candidate, to his realizing a life-long dream of bringing free, universal medical coverage to Saskatchewan citizens — a radical concept soon embraced by federal Conservative and Liberal governments in the 1960s.

Michael Therriault as Tommy Douglas, crafting another barnburner. Photo Allan Feildel.

Therriault expertly replicates the Prairie politician’s public speaking voice, a rusty-gate yowl with the barest trace of a Highland burr. (Douglas moved with his family from Scotland to Winnipeg at age 10.) Just as important, he offers a persuasive physical impersonation of a trained boxer-actor-preacher who used every bit of his education to bob and weave through crowds, seducing audiences while outperforming and shaming political opponents.

That Therriault manages Douglas’s plucked-tuning-fork intensity is crucial to director Smith’s take on the political leader as a socialist messiah gripped with the fever of a single idea: transforming Canada into the socialist New Jerusalem of his dreams. “You can lock up a mouse or a man, but you can’t lock up an idea,” Smith quotes Douglas as saying. And the filmmaker frequently returns to Douglas’s standard stump speech: that it was time mice stopped electing cats to represent them in parliament and for everyone to assist each other while helping build a better country.

Smith shrewdly uses National Film Board archival documentary footage of dustbowl tragedies, showing us farmers’ wives sweeping sand dunes out of storm-ravaged shacks, before cutting to dramatic re-enactments of social problems of the day. Early on, we see Rev. Douglas bring a charity basket to a farmer on relief, only to find a gruff government inspector administering “means tests,” asking the family to strip off their garments.

“Why does [the mother] have to take off her clothes?” blushing Douglas asks a young neighbour outside. The boy shrugs. Families aren’t eligible for relief unless inspectors see their ribs, he explains. 

After making the searing docudrama The Boys of St. Vincent (1993), Smith went to Hollywood where he became frustrated by the conventions of commercial filmmaking, although he scored a hit for mogul producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson on the Michelle Pfeiffer movie Dangerous Minds (1995). Watching his latest work it is clear why the director is more comfortable making films on his home turf: Prairie Giant is a model of the rousing, social-realist filmmaking advocated by NFB founder John Grierson.

In a manner former Manitoba boxing champion Douglas would approve of, Smith likes to catch an audience with its guard down before administering haymakers. He presents a bloody battle between striking miners and police with a minimum of detail, then, after the worst is presumably over, pulls in tight and lingering on a tombstone that reads:

                 Lest We Forget
    Murdered in Estevan, Sept. 29, 1931
                    by RCMP

Other surprises include the casting of an ex-Codco mischief-maker, the ever-delightful Andy Jones, as Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King, CCFer Douglas’s best friend in Parliament. Actor-director Don McKellar is also quite good as Douglas’s urbane Saskatchewan provincial treasurer, Clarence Fines. And Smith’s best jab to the ribs comes when he shows Douglas, in 1960, visiting his estranged adviser after Fines has separated from both the CCF and his wife in an effort to start a new life.

Michael Therriault as Tommy Douglas confers with Don McKellar as Clarence Fines, Saskatchewan provincial treasurer. Photo Allan Feildel.

Douglas knocks on his old friend’s door, needing to discuss a possible move from the provincial CCF to form a national socialist party, the NDP, but is for once struck dumb by what he encounters: Fines is wearing an ascot and cavorting with a divorcee in Capri pants, and the walls inside are splashed in swirling colours — modern art! Bongo music percolates in the background. The former Baptist minister orders Clarence to ditch the girl, stuttering, “You’re so busy being virile you can’t think.”

In addition to being very funny, the scene reminds us that while Douglas is a man of his time, times inevitably change.

Therriault captures Douglas’s bewilderment here, while McKellar offers a memorable snapshot of middle-aged vanity revealed. Indeed, director Smith is always very good at charting the progress of the “mice” in his story. Kristin Booth’s (ReGenesis) droll, sympathetic performance as Tommy’s wife, Irma, is typical of the miniseries’ tender regard for its heroes, large and small. 

The fat “cats” are something else again, as Douglas’s adversaries, from Saskatchewan Liberal Premier James Garfield Gardiner (Brian Markinson, Da Vinci’s City Hall) to Douglas’s Weyburn political rival (Da Vinci himself, Nicholas Campbell), are never more than miserable, hissing villains. The filmmaker’s contempt for the medical establishment that fought Douglas’s medicare plan is evident in his naming the group’s unsmiling fictional leader Dr. Moulds (R.H. Thomson).

On measure, the miniseries’ small failures are insignificant given its larger accomplishment: bringing alive the story of a small man who made his country better. Anyone who wondered why Douglas won the 2004 “Greatest Canadian” competition should take the time to watch this series.

Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, a two-part four-hour dramatic miniseries, airs Sunday, March 12 and Monday, March 13 at 8 p.m. on CBC-TV.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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