Oh, Canada

Richard Gere

I may be mistaken, but it seemed that Paul Schrader's Oh, Canada was received underwhelmingly by American critics. Conversely, I think the film, along with 2007's The Walker, is one of his better efforts in this century. I am far from an admirer of Schrader as a director, recent films like First Reformed have struck me as overly tortured and derivative, but Oh, Canada's screenplay is the best text Schrader has had to work with in a while. The screenplay is based on the late Russell Banks' novel Foregone, a great writer Schrader mined successfully with his film version of Affliction in 1997. Oh Canada is concerned with a documentary filmmaker based in Montreal named Leo Fife and played by Richard Gere. Fife has terminal cancer and he has agreed to a filmed interview with documentarians he has taught and mentored. This device allows Schrader to investigate Fife's past with Jacob Elordi impersonating (sometimes) Fife as a young man. 

The films flits back and forth through time, sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color. A lot of critics found this presentation "muddled", but I thought it was an honest attempt by Schrader to portray the mental decomposition of Fife. Schrader has never been a visually supple director, so he succeeds only partially here, there are too many shots of Gere furrowing his brow, but he does end up conveying Fife's confusion. At least his visual flubs are sins of commission and not omission. I did like the bits we see of Fife's documentaries, all period appropriate. Fife has a sterling reputation as a liberal crusader after, supposedly, fleeing his home country and the draft for Canada. However, he makes plain that his motives were not so idealistic. Fife was also bailing on two wives (one an ex), each with a child. Fife has rejected advances to reconnect with his children and wallows in guilt, here as elsewhere Schrader's main thematic interest.

What helps this tortured memory play is Gere's underacting. He nails Fife's grandiosity and testiness, but also manages to convey, confined to a wheelchair for much of the film, his character's rage at his own imminent implosion. Gere could always move through the frame as though he owned it, but this largely immobile performance is evidence of artistic growth. Elordi and the supporting cast are spot on, but Uma Thurman, as Fife's last wife, is disastrous. Only with Tarantino and Philip Kaufman has she looked relaxed and in character onscreen. Oh, Canada is a weird mixture of good and bad, Phosphorescent's score is both lyrically appropriate and soporific, but Russell Banks tortured realism once again proves a good fit with Schrader's reformed Calvinism.