“Practically the 51st state”: ‘Canadian Bacon’ turns 30

Michael Moore’s first and only fiction film was only fitfully funny, but anticipated a few things about the 21st century.

With U.S.-Canada relations suddenly at their most tense in decades, and the president of the United States putting tariffs on Canada and openly musing about making Canada the “51st state,” what better time to look back on a film about a war between the two countries, one in which there was even a “51st state” joke?

The film is Canadian Bacon, and it was released in September of 1995, 30 years ago this month. The comedic satire film was written and directed by Michael Moore, and is his only non-documentary film to date.

And while it’s not a documentary, Canadian Bacon is firmly in line with both Moore’s worldview, his many longtime hobbyhorses, and his sense of humor. It even starts with a town being devastated by a plant closing down, shades of the director’s Roger and Me.

The film received bad reviews and was a financial flop, leading Moore never to make another fiction film again, although his most acclaimed documentaries would follow in the early 2000s. And while Canadian Bacon isn’t particularly funny, and its best ideas would be done better by other films later on in the ‘90s, its screenplay did anticipate quite a few things in the new millennium- and not only a new wave of U.S./Canada belligerance.

Canadian Bacon is set in a mid-1990s America in which the Cold War is over, and the government is bummed out because it now lacks a permanent enemy. This hurts the political fortunes of the ineffectual president (Alan Alda), while his national security adviser (Kevin Pollak) is doing the bidding of an evil defense contractor (G.D. Spradlin, Senator Geary from The Godfather Part II, among many other roles.)

There’s an attempt by the government to get things going with Russia again, but the Russian president shows up and admits they got their asses kicked and doesn’t seem to have any interest in Putin-style imperialism. The movie’s idea of an in-joke is that the Russian leader eats all the time, instead of drinking like Boris Yeltsin did.

So instead, attention turns to the North, where the Niagara Falls sheriff (John Candy) has instigated a hockey brtawl-turned-international incident by declaring “the beer sucks.”

Before long, government and media are working hand in hand to gin up anti-Canadian sentiment. The third act turns into Dr. Strangelove, thanks to the villain trying to disprove mutually-assured destruction theory by launching missiles for insane reasons, although in this case the ending is happier.