The Trotsky is a 2009 Canadian comedy film directed by Jacob Tierney

Jacob Tierney

Jacob Daniel Tierney is a Canadian actor, film director and screenwriter.Tierney was born in Montreal, Quebec, the son of veteran producer Kevin Tierney...

.

Plot

Montreal West high school

Royal West Academy

Royal West Academy is a public anglophone secondary school in Montreal, Quebec. Royal West has limited enrollment, and prospective students are only admitted after an entrance examination and interview. It is situated on Easton Avenue in Montreal West, but its students come from all parts of the...

 student Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel

Jonathan Adam Saunders "Jay" Baruchel is a Canadian actor. He has had a successful career in comedy films, and has appeared in supporting roles in such box office successes as Million Dollar Baby, Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder, as well as starring in films like She's Out of My League, The Trotsky,...

) believes that he is the reborn incarnation of Marxist

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

/Bolshevik

Bolshevik

The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

 leader Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

. Shortly after he starts to work in his family's clothing factory, he attempts to unionize the workplace with such actions as a hunger strike. He is pulled from his upper-class private school by his father (Saul Rubinek

Saul Rubinek

Saul Rubinek is a Canadian actor, director, producer and playwright, known for his work in TV, film and the stage.-Early life:...

) and sent to the public school system. There, he continues his quest to live out Trotsky's activism, as he is pitted against the strong-willed principal Mr. Berkhoff (Colm Feore

Colm Feore

Colm Feore is an American-born Canadian stage, film and television actor.-Early life:Feore was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Irish parents who lived in Ireland for several years during Feore's early life. The family subsequently moved to Windsor, Ontario, where Feore grew up.After graduating...

). Meanwhile, he seeks romance with older graduate student Alexandra (Emily Hampshire

Emily Hampshire

Emily Hampshire is a Canadian film and television actress.She is most widely known to international audiences for her role as Angelina to Sean Astin's Michael in the 1998 romantic comedy Boy Meets Girl, and Vivienne in the 2006 film Snow Cake, in which she starred opposite Sigourney Weaver and...

).

Release

The film was first previewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

Toronto International Film Festival

The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly-attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, 339 films from 59 countries were screened at 32 screens in downtown Toronto venues...

 11 September 2009. In the United States, it was screened at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival

The Tribeca Film Festival is a film festival founded in 2002 by Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff in a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the consequent loss of vitality in the TriBeCa neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.The mission of the festival...

. Its general Canadian release was on 14 May 2010.

Reception

The Toronto Star gave The Trotsky a positive review, particularly of the cast. Another positive review from Montreal's The Gazette

The Gazette (Montreal)

The Gazette, often called the Montreal Gazette to avoid ambiguity, is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with three other daily English newspapers all having shut down at different times during the second half of the 20th century.-History:In 1778,...

noted the "inspired, often-dangerously-funny screenplay" of the "too-talented" Tierney, likening the film to Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a 1986 American teen coming-of-age comedy film written and directed by John Hughes.The film follows high school senior Ferris Bueller , who decides to skip school and spend the day in downtown Chicago...

.

Web review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

 assessed the film at 79% on its Tomatometer with an average rating of 6.9/10, based on 9 reviews.

External links

• The Trotsky at Metacritic
  Metacritic
  Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...