Oh, Canada
Director: Paul Schrader
Cert: None
Genre: Drama
Starring: Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman, Victoria Hill, Michael Imperioli, Penelope Mitchell, Kristine Froseth
Running Time: 1 hr 35 mins
The past decade has seen a welcome renaissance for Paul Schrader. Freed from the shackles of studio interference, the director of American Gigolo, Mishima, Affliction and Auto Focus has blossomed as an indie film-maker.
The tormented heroes seeking redemption in his so-called Man in a Room trilogy – First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener – offer the purest expression of Schrader’s complicated Calvinist background since his scripts for the Martin Scorsese films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ.
Oh, Canada shifts tone for a deathbed confession by a compromised film-maker, as played by Richard Gere, star of American Gigolo. Jacob Elordi plays the hero as a younger man. Where Schrader and Gere’s earlier collaboration turned sex into sleek menace, this film reframes desire as decaying, regretful memory.
Adapted from Russell Banks’s novel Foregone, Oh, Canada centres on Leonard Fife, a celebrated documentary maker facing terminal cancer in his Montreal home.
A former student who is now an admiring film-maker sets up a camera to capture his legacy. Leonard wants something messier, however: a chance to confess, primarily to his wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), whose presence he insists on.
The romantic idea of a young Leonard crossing the border to avoid the Vietnam draft gives way to something less heroic.
Schrader fractures the story into non-linear shards, hopping between Leonard’s present-day testimony and an unreliable past embodied by Elordi.
The film is less concerned with chronology than with credibility. Scenes replay with subtle variations. Is Leonard finally telling the truth, or is he rewriting himself one last time? Schrader offers no certainty, only the suggestion that self-mythologising may be this man’s final legacy.
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With a riveting turn, Gere, once cinema’s swaggering dreamboat, appears deliberately ravaged. Elordi embodies callow youth at its most alluring. Thurman, alas, is given comparatively little to do.
In common with much of Schrader’s late work, Oh, Canada is austere, talkative and faintly ungainly, building towards an ending that withholds catharsis or time to mend. It lacks the wild provocations of Schrader’s scalding recent trilogy, but Oh, Canada pokes and probes in quieter, sneakier ways.
On digital platforms from Monday, January 12th
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