Oh, Canada: Richard Gere Stars as A Filmmaker On His Deathbed, Re-Editing His Past
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada, based on Russell Banks’ final novel Foregone, is a confined affair, suggesting the art of constructing complicated toy sailing ships in small bottles. Confined, but complicated. A dying documentary filmmaker on the last day of his life, spills the contents of his whole messy life.
Richard Gere, who starred in Schrader’s American Gigolo 44 years ago in his beautiful youth, now plays the filmmaker Leonard “Leo” Fine, who is grizzled with age spots, dying of prostate cancer, as he is being wheeled by a care worker from his bedroom to the wood-panelled living room of his elegant Montreal apartment, which has been prepared and lit for a film shoot.
Filmmakers Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Susan (Victoria Hill) — both Leonard’s former students — want to shoot a documentary about Leonard’s career from the time he arrived in Canada as a draft resister in his early twenties to his long and much-awarded career as a celebrated artiste engage… if he doesn’t die first.
Also in attendance at the apartment is young assistant Sloan (Penelope Mitchell) who arouses Leonard’s erotic speculations, and Leo’s wife Emma (Uma Thurman) who watches the shooting in increasing discomfort. Malcolm, the filmmaker, using a technique which he says Leonard invented, based on Errol Morris’s patented Interrotron setup, in which the subject and interviewer face each other through monitors.
The filmmakers hope to collect anecdotes about Leo’s career for a farewell tribute but Leonard has different ideas. He wants to use the camera as a confessional, to tell the world about his past sins, the wife and child he abandoned in Virginia, the other wife he left in Florida, the best friend he betrayed in Vermont and to set the record straight about the political hero he never was. “When you have no future… and when your life is a lie, especially to those close to you, like mine, you can’t exist except as a fictional character,” Leonard laments.
The face he insists he wants to see in the monitor while he talks is that of his wife, Emma. What he wants isn’t exactly clear: perhaps forgiveness, at least transparency. But Emma is upset by his honesty. She insists that his cocktail of medication is messing with his mind. His confessions diminish her and the worth of her marriage. “He wants to confess that he’s a coward and that he never loved anyone,” she says.
With stops for naps and bathroom breaks, Leonard keeps talking, busily re-editing the scenes from his life. As the screen widens from the squarish Academy ratio, Gere is replaced by his younger self, played by Jacob Elordi. Some scenes are in black and white. A couple of times, the present-day Gere appears in his own past and, in his confusion, Thurman pops up playing a different character from the late ‘60s, the wife of his best friend who gave him a sneaky hand job one night.
We also see brief excerpts of the sort of muckraking films Leonard made, earnest films about the American military testing Agent Orange in New Brunswick; the brutality of the sealing industry, the trial of a Catholic bishop charged with child sexual abuse.
In another disorienting layer which Shrader has added, we also hear voiceover narration of Leonard’s adult son, Cornell (Zack Schaffer) who Leonard abandoned when the boy was three. These scenes are stitched together with a soundtrack emphasizing mournful folk-country laments, mostly from American singer-songwriter Mathew Houk.
On one level, we are recognizably in Schrader land — see America Gigolo, Autofocus, Affliction and First Reformed, and as screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull — where emotionally isolated men are forced to confront their moral flaws and spiritual emptiness.
Yet Oh, Canada also sticks closely to Banks’ novel, which reviewers have pointed out, tracks “with uncanny precision” events in the writers’ life and his emotional responses, recorded in his non-fiction book, Voyager (2016). Foregone may be understood as metafictional, an examination of how a writer reconfigures the emotional raw material of experience into art, in deceiving and revealing. As the movie voiceover says, he lives between “between one country and another, the past and the present.”
Since the film’s debut at Cannes last May, critics have been divided in their reactions to Oh, Canada. Some find it confusing and inconclusive. To my taste, the performances are specific and well-grounded and the craft, with the varied cinematography and complex editing, are impressive. But as the film moves briskly toward its conclusion, it feels detached, with little evidence of redemption or even the satisfaction of the filmmaker’s clear intention.
My sense is that the question of the open meaning of Leonard’s death is directed to the viewer, like Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Theologically speaking, we can see that Leonard is incapable of accepting grace, the undeserved gift of God’s love. On a secular level, if Emma chooses to believe their love was real, he might leave her with that, but Leonard remains the kind of egomaniac artist who thinks his death should be all about him.
Oh, Canada. Directed and written by Paul Schrader. Starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli and Jacob Elordi. In select theatres December 13.