Paul Schrader made this movie because he almost died. He was hospitalized three times with COVID-19 and for a time was fairly certain he wasn’t going to make it. Ultimately, he pulled through, but it left him feeling vividly attuned to his own mortality, his life and his legacy. And in Schrader fashion, he honed in on the bleak and meaningless notions of those ideas. For his first film in recovery and hopefully not his last, he turned to a novel by Russell Banks, a friend whose Affliction he adapted in 1997, and who died of cancer in 2023. Banks's penultimate novel Foregone was a reckoning for the author, as Schrader's movie version is for himself. He titled it Oh, Canada.
That name obviously perks the ears of this Canadian critic, but the film is not so much about Canada or coming to Canada as it is about truth, regret, and de-mythologizing; about the consequences of mistakes and of running from them right up until the end -asking if getting demons off one's chest is valuable for its own sake, or if it's just a selfish exercise. Going back to Taxi Driver, Schrader could be accused of consistently revealing too much of himself in his movies (though to be clear they are never strictly biographical). Here he does so again, perhaps for the last time, through a character who is also a filmmaker, seeking to set the record straight about himself at death's door.
Richard Gere, partnering with Schrader for the first time since American Gigolo in 1980, is Leo Fife, an acclaimed political documentary filmmaker in Montreal who allegedly was a Vietnam draft dodger to Canada in the 1960s -a story that has garnered him fame and tremendous respect among left-leaning Canadians. In the present though, he is suffering from terminal cancer, and agrees to sit for a CBC interview on his life and career, conducted by a couple former students. But Fife isn’t interested in regaling the same myth, and rather intends to use the platform as a confessional to both the public and his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) on the true facts of his life and the nature of his immigration.
Reflecting his garbled mind, his backstory is revealed in a nonlinear fashion, with different eras of his life occupying different styles of flashback -most of them featuring an impeccably cast Jacob Elordi as the younger Fife, initially from Virginia, eventually relocated to a town in Vermont right near the Canadian border -which acts as a temptation through his young adult life. But not as an escape from Vietnam -just an escape.
Schrader gradually reveals Fife’s deceptions and transgressions with sobriety, even as Fife’s own appears to be in question. Indeed given his state of mental health in the present and the manner in which he drifts -never at all interested in talking about his film career, which he claims came to him by accident- there is a shard of ambiguity cast over his story. How much is real and how much is just his perceived self-loathing? It is clear though that as a stifled young educated man with ambition, he came to resent the direction his life was heading in, and hopped the border in some vague hope to start afresh -abandoning with little care a wife and child in the process.
Fife’s whole reputation is built on deceit -he seems at best apathetic to the effects of his work exposing corruption- even his personality something of a calibrated performance, at least up until now. Gere plays it with suitable disdain, an unpleasant figure who can finally take the mask of cordiality off, but who beneath the surface cares a great deal about baring his soul. And it is fascinating to intuit Schrader through him, perhaps not the specific details, but the overview of a kind of cynical, daresay self-serving remorse. Not real remorse, Fife doesn’t appear to have regrets about his actions, and in his final line essentially confirms it; but a remorse for the dismay in his soul that he seems to believe can only be extinguished by fully unearthing his sins. It’s certainly very Catholic in nature, always a common theme for Schrader, Fife’s interview segments shot in front of a black backdrop that through the camera lens evokes the confessional booth. Schrader is not so forthcoming as this counterpart, though the fierceness, the dimness of perspective, and the crotchety attitude -none of which are natural traits for Gere, though he performs them well- feel like naked conduits. Schrader I think recognizes that and is perhaps as fascinated and disturbed as we are that those are the emotions and memories and impulses that colour the mind so close to the end. It is quite an uncomfortable film in that respect.
The choice to alternate style and aspect ratio for the various flashbacks better situates the audience but doesn’t really lend much flare to the sequences. Perhaps because the drama feels a touch muted. The harshness of his actions aside, Schrader doesn’t have much interest in delving into Fife’s listlessness itself. Even as he provides a first-hand account, he is distant from the audience -an intentional choice, but one that leaves him in spite of his scandalous array of indiscretions, a less interesting anti-hero than Schrader's other recent characters. Schrader also like Fife rejects giving the audience what they want -much as Fife adamantly doesn't talk about his career, Schrader doesn't show most of the nefarious actions of Fife's past, simply alluding to his grooming of two separate students, his invention of the lie of going to Cuba, and most prominently any of his early life in Canada (the film was in fact entirely shot in New York state). However we do see his actual dodging of the draft, much earlier than he claimed, by pretending to be gay, and a severe scene from later in life where he is ambushed at a Montreal Film Festival by his adult son -this related by Emma.
The intent behind all of these though is to showcase Fife's apathy about his world and life in general. His second wife Alicia (Kristine Froseth), the mother of his child, doesn't actually appear all that much in his memories -his relationship to a colleague Stanley (Jake Weary), with whom he commiserates, gets more attention. Elordi plays a quiet psychopathy through these scenes, nicely mirrored by Gere's commentary. The only moment of authenticity of emotion comes when he does at last cross the border, which Schrader underscores with a triumphant needle-drop of the titular anthem.
It was an act of running away and Fife has been doing that his whole life. Schrader doesn't make it easy to assess though why the guilt of this prompted his last minute insistence on tearing the curtain away, de-mystifying and denigrating his own legacy, and yet not expressing honest regret over anything either. Some effort to free his soul perhaps? Surely he's too much a cynic to believe in salvation, especially for a gesture so nakedly disingenuous? Maybe it's so the public can share in his self-loathing. I don't think Schrader feels this way for himself, but I do think O, Canada was a cathartic movie for him. He needed that exercise in contending with the disparate tracks of legacy and life. And his audience could appreciate too the reminder that a figure is more than their public perception, more than their art; and who they really are isn't always flattering.
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