Paul Schrader is on a tear. Oh, Canada (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is his third writing/directing effort in four years, a not-insubstantial amount of work for any filmmaker, especially one who’s 78 and has fought through a few recent health scares and hospitalizations. Perhaps he’s feeling his mortality. Scratch that – he’s definitely feeling his mortality, if recent interviews and the subject of Oh, Canada tell us anything. The film stars Schrader’s old American Gigolo pal Richard Gere as a dying documentary filmmaker reflecting on his life via flashbacks, his younger self played by current hot-lister Jacob Elordi. And with the future in doubt for aging men, the film holds firmly to the past and the present, in fascinating fashion.
The Gist: This is Leonard Fife’s (Gere) opportunity to untangle the web he weaved. Stricken by cancer. Near death. Numbed by opiates. Wearing a diaper. Monitored 24/7 by nurses. Yet he’s agreed to sit in front of a camera and talk about his life for a documentary film. He’s long been behind that camera, being an acclaimed documentary filmmaker himself. His trophy case is full. The directors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), are a couple, and Leonard’s former students. He seduced Diana decades ago, which is one of the cats he’s letting out of the bag today as he brushes past their list of 25 questions and launches into a monologue addressing many of the lies he’s told about himself throughout his career – how he escaped to Canada to protest the Vietnam draft, hung out in communist Cuba, etc. He was a writer who wrote his own story, truth, embellishments, fabrications and all. He made himself larger than life and now all he’s left with is the very little that remains of his life.
Leonard sits in front of an Errol Morris-style Interrotron setup so he’s always looking directly into the lens. But Leo doesn’t want to speak to Malcolm. He insists on speaking directly to his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), long his producing partner and his rock. That’s because she needs to know the truth more than anyone. Nobody’s comfortable with this, of course. Malcolm and Diana intended to make “a protege’s homage” but now they’re getting big dishy scoops via Leo’s gravelly confessions – big dishy scoops that Emma insists are the product of the drugs and the addled memory. It’s not right for them to keep filming, even if they don’t use it, she insists. But Leo just keeps going.
We see scattered snatches of Leo’s past as he remembers them, and as you’re no doubt well aware, relaying memories is so rarely chronological. In 1968, Leo (Elordi) was married with a child and a pregnant wife in Virginia, at a crossroads between getting a college teaching gig in Vermont or working for his heavily moneyed father-in-law’s business. Before leaving for what’s supposed to be a temporary trip to Vermont, he says goodbye to his toddler son, and we hear the kid’s now-adult voice narrate, “My father was wearing a khaki jacket. I didn’t see him again for 30 years.” He sleeps with other women hours after learning his wife miscarried. Years later, he sits in a classroom instructing students who include young Malcolm, Diana and Emma. We jump from 22-year-old Leo to his irascible present self and many points between. Closure, truth, a reckoning – whatever it is he’s seeking, it’s a messy process, and it’s uncertain if he ever gets there. And you begin to feel like that might be a universal truth.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Oh, Canada is a sideways step from Schrader’s recent “solitary man trilogy” – First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener, all excellent-to-great. And it boasts ties to some of his best work: Gere and Gigolo, and like Affliction, it’s based on a book by Russell Banks.
Performance Worth Watching: Elordiites might be disappointed with him getting the short end of a roughly 60/40 screen time split with Gere, who carries most of the dramatic load here, and plays against his silver-fox persona with a gritty, unglam performance.
Memorable Dialogue: Leonard pushes back against Emma’s attempt to shut down the interview: “This is my final prayer. And whether or not you believe in god, you don’t lie when you pray.”
Sex and Skin: A fairly nude sex scene featuring Elordi and Megan MacKenzie.
Our Take: Coherence isn’t Oh, Canada’s strong suit – but coherence may be beside the point. This is an exploration of failing, fractured memory, after all, and Schrader drops the older Gere into Elordi flashbacks, and casts Thurman as two different characters, to underscore the untrustworthy narrator. We stand challenged by the material, and not to keep up or make sense of it, but to suss out why Schrader executes it in such a messy and convoluted manner. The story of the film’s making – he filmed it on a shoestring in an impressively efficient 17 days – is too easy of an explanation. There’s intent to the film’s muddle, and I’m left partly puzzled and partly the apologist but mostly certain that uncertainty, and a degree of meta-reflection (or self-flagellation?) perhaps, seems to be Schrader’s goal. Real, honest truth is subjective, and wrangling it is like trying to grasp a column of water with your hands.
Schrader’s recent films have zoomed in on male characters reckoning with their past and wrestling with the men they’ve become: Ethan Hawke’s pastor in First Reformed has become a different, paranoid man after being shaken from his deep and unwavering faith. Oscar Isaac’s professional gambler in The Card Counter is a former soldier who forged his game face in the fires of Iraq War brutality. Joel Edgerton’s gardener in Master Gardener found his peace among florals and greenery after forgoing his white-supremacist ideology. And now, a variation on a theme via Gere’s Leonard Fife, who papered over misdeeds with self-mythology, and now wants to strip away the artifice as an act of deathbed penance – although it’s inevitably more complicated and mysterious and open to interpretation than that, as Schrader is absolutely not in the spoonfeeding business, and never has been. Oh, Canada is slippery and impressionistic, and there’s absolutely fascination to be had in experiencing Schrader’s half-blind, melancholic rummaging through truth and memory.
Our Call: Oh, Canada isn’t quite the dramatic-powerhouse flex of Schrader’s best work, but it’s a film with complex, evolving ideas that linger in the mind, and the work of one of cinema’s most restless philosophers. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.