Long live the revolutionary

This article originally ran during the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.

If you're going to delude yourself into thinking you're a historical figure, you could do much better than to pick the doomed Russian revolutionary  Leon Trotsky. Let’s see: he was a loser in the Soviet power struggle, was repeatedly exiled, was hunted by his rival Stalin and finally came to a gruesome end in Mexico, thanks to an assassin with an alpine pickaxe.

'I was a pretty political young man and I became very enamoured of Trotsky. I viewed him as a very exciting, romantic historical figure.' — Jacob Tierney, director of The Trotsky

That doesn't seem to have fazed Leon Bronstein. A geeky Jewish teenager in present-day Montreal, he just happens to share the same birth name as Trotsky, and that’s somehow convinced him he's the second coming of the communist messiah. On his bedroom wall, he’s tacked a list of goals to help him realize his destiny. They range from "Marry an older woman named Alexandra" right down to "Get assassinated [hopefully somewhere warm]."

Jacob Tierney's comedy The Trotsky, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a fresh, witty take on teenage rebellion that imagines what might happen if a fiery young Bolshevik tried to stir up a revolution in complacent, bourgeois Canada. It stars Jay Baruchel (Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder) as the hilariously solemn Leon, who emulates Trotsky right down to the steel-rimmed glasses and Struwwelpeter hair. He’s a rebel with a socialist cause, whether it’s organizing a union at his dad’s garment factory, whipping his high school’s listless student union into a gang of social activists or attempting to oust the "fascist" school principal in a daring coup.

Leon may sound crazy, but he’s really just a comic exaggeration of his creator.

"I was a pretty political young man and I became very enamoured of Trotsky," says the not-quite-30-year-old writer-director during an interview at CBC’s Toronto Broadcast Centre. "I viewed him as a very exciting, romantic historical figure."

Like the more popular Che Guevara, Trotsky has the rose-coloured image of a "pure" Communist, an ambassador of revolution ultimately martyred for his ideals. "That’s what I liked about him," Tierney says. "He was never in a position of power. He was the great enemy of Stalin. And he was an intellectual, a man of ideas, he travelled the world, had an affair with Frida Kahlo. He led a life."

Leon’s determination to lead the same life compels him to pursue Alexandra (Emily Hampshire), a 27-year-old law student, because she has the same name as Trotsky’s first wife. In the student union, he finds a surly opponent (Jesse Rath) that he is convinced is his Stalin. He’s also on the lookout for a Lenin, but the guy who just happens to be the spitting image of the Bolshevik leader is Principal Berkhoff (Colm Feore), a haughty high school despot who has more in common with Czar Nicholas II.

Tierney says the Lenin joke was a happy accident. Feore turned up on set the first day with a goatee and Tierney thought nothing of it. "A couple of mornings later, he was just talking to Jay by this… massive poster of Lenin. I turned to the cinematographer, Guy Dufaux, and I said, ‘He looks a lot like Lenin, doesn’t he?’ And we created a shot out of it. We realized we had to – it was too funny not to."

Tierney’s script is rife with references to Trotsky, the Russian Revolution and its iconic images. When he dreams, Leon has a recurring nightmare based on the baby carriage scene from Eisenstein’s Soviet masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. The gags reach their height during a social justice-themed school dance, organized by Leon, in which students dress up as hordes of Maoists, Mexican Zapatistas, the denizens of Orwell’s Animal Farm and, in one case, the Barbarella-era Jane Fonda. When a confused girl shows up as capitalist philosopher Ayn Rand, Leon summarily kicks her out.  ("You can’t diss Ayn Rand enough," Tierney says with a laugh.)

The film is Tierney’s second feature as a director and a far cry from his debut, Twist (2004), a dark update of Oliver Twist set among gay hustlers and made for less than $200,000. For The Trotsky, Tierney had a $6.4-million budget and the chance to pack his cast with top-flight Canadian actors. They include veterans Feore, Saul Rubinek (as Leon’s dad), Anne-Marie Cadieux (as Leon’s stepmother), Domini Blythe (as a martinet English teacher) and Geneviève Bujold (as the testy head of the school board). Tierney also pulled in pals like Jessica Paré and Liane Balaban to play small roles, and got TV host Ben Mulroney to do a self-mocking cameo as himself. Montreal band Malajube provided the film’s raucous rock score.

"I feel really privileged," Tierney says. "In Canada, you don’t get a budget like that very often." The movie, like Twist, was produced by his father, Kevin Tierney, who struck box-office gold a few years back with the comedy Bon Cop/Bad Cop, and who just received the annual CFTPA Producer’s Award at TIFF.

Jacob started acting at five and spent his formative years on various television shows, including the YTV series Are You Afraid of the Dark? More recent credits include the miniseries of Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman and the S&M comedy Walk All Over Me. The urge to write and direct, however, came early in his career. "As a kid, it became clear to me very quickly that there’s a storyteller, a person whose job it is to determine what it is I’m acting, and it definitely appealed to me."

Tierney says he’s still an admirer of Trotsky, but now, his youthful infatuation is tempered by a better understanding of the man. "A ton of what he says I still completely support. When I hear friends of mine on the left defending [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez, I think of Trotsky. Trotsky was the one who called American lefty intellectuals who defended Stalin in the ’30s and ’40s ‘radical tourists,’ because they didn’t know what they were talking about."

But Trotsky also founded the Red Army, and could be a ruthless leader. "Like Che, he’s appealing to romantics like me, but also dangerous to not understand properly. They both did a lot of terrible things as well. They’re complicated people."

The Trotsky opens May 14.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.