Near the beginning of “Oh, Canada,” Paul Schrader’s adaptation of his friend Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” a small camera crew is preparing a room for a documentary interview. It’s a beautiful room, with dark wood-paneled walls, antique furnishings, a case containing awards and trophies. It looks like the home of someone who has led an interesting and successful life.
The space belongs to Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a documentarian and something of a left-wing celebrity living in Montreal with his wife and creative partner of many years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Fife is dying. But he’s agreed to allow two former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), themselves documentary filmmakers, to interview him on camera. They are champing at the bit to memorialize him, but Fife’s motives in agreeing are not purely about the film.
The themes running through much of Schrader’s work, especially lately, revolve around redemption — the messiness of it, the possibility of it, the impossibility of it. The man who wrote “Taxi Driver” has, in his 70s, given us “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener,” movies about solitary men wrestling with the task of living in a world that humanity has wrecked, and the dread of discovering oneself personally unforgivable for one’s place in it. A recurring line from “First Reformed” feels like a precis for all of these: Will God forgive us?
“Oh, Canada” circles around this theme, too. But while the men of the recent trilogy have preferred to pour their thoughts into journals, Fife is the kind of person who bottles everything up, able to move forward only by ditching the past. His life — at least before he crossed the border into Canada as a much younger man, leaving everything behind — is a series of secrets that not even his wife was fully aware of. His admirers, and history, see his crossing to Canada as bold protest against the Vietnam draft. But the story is more complicated, and now he feels he must get it off his chest before he crosses another border.
In other words, he must confess. This religious practice, confession, is the beating soul of “Oh, Canada.” It’s signaled early: When the documentary crew is preparing the room for Fife, they awkwardly move a decorated Christmas tree out of the shot, revealing a portrait of some clergyman on the wall. Then, as the filmmakers get started with the shoot, they tell Fife that they’re going to be using the technology he developed, which seems to be the Interrotron we associate with the work of Errol Morris. It creates a way for an interview subject to feel as if they’re maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while actually looking directly into the camera lens. Morris (and, presumably, the fictional Fife) has said that this leads to more revelation. He’s also compared the tool’s results, its ability to rip away self-consciousness, to Freud’s psychoanalysis couch.
Fife mentions Freud, too. But I couldn’t help thinking of a confessional booth, in which a scrim between priest and parishioner is designed to make way for more frank and honest disclosure of the supplicant’s sins. For the faithful, confession is a ritual designed to cleanse the soul, to clear the air between themselves and God. But confession has psychological effects that extend far beyond religious practice, which is why telling things to a therapist or a friend, or posting them anonymously to the internet, is something that people do whether or not the divine is involved.
In Fife’s case, he’s irritated with the setup; he wants to see his wife, Emma, rather than the filmmakers, as he answers the questions. Because this is not about recording his answers for posterity. It’s about unburdening his soul to the one person who, for him, deserves to know the truth.
Schrader’s approach to this material — it’s his second movie based on a novel by Banks, the first being “Affliction” (1998) — is fascinating, a filmmaker’s translation in every sense of the word. In the novel, it’s never completely clear if the pieces of Fife’s past that we’re hearing him confess are happening out loud or in his mind. He is sick, and nearing the end of his life, and time slips for him, sliding back and forth, getting confused here and there. Sporadic voice-over is sometimes Fife’s inner thoughts. But sometimes it’s an unidentifiable voice, eventually revealed to belong to Fife’s son Cornel (Zach Shaffer), whom Fife long ago abandoned, along with Alicia (Kristine Froseth), Cornel’s mother and Fife’s second wife.
To give us all this back story, Schrader casts the lanky Jacob Elordi as the younger version of Fife, a man in his early 20s poised at a fork in the road. On the one side is a life with Alicia and Cornel and a job working for his in-laws’ company, eventually running it. That life is comfortable and he also doesn’t want it, but isn’t sure why. On the other side is — well, what is there? He doesn’t really know. The impulse to run is overwhelming, and the draft has given him moral cover, after a fashion, for escaping everything and starting over.
Elordi has clearly studied Gere’s younger self carefully, which must have included Gere’s starring role in Schrader’s “American Gigolo” (1980). They don’t look alike, and Elordi is much taller, but he’s figured out how Gere walks and smiles. Meanwhile Gere is playing a dying man, with hair and skin that signals the cancer has ruined his body. But sometimes Gere shows up in scenes from decades earlier. Sometimes the images are suddenly in black and white. Sometimes characters from the wrong time in his life walk through the door.
His memory is slipping. Or did he tangle it all long ago? “When you have no future, all you have is the past,” he tells the filmmakers. “And if your past is a lie, then you cease to exist.”
You can’t watch “Oh, Canada” without thinking of old men and confession and mortality and regret. Schrader had a rather public health scare several years ago, and Banks died in 2023. The filmmakers of Schrader’s generation — Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese in particular — keep making films that feel like manifestoes and mea culpas all rolled into one. That Fife himself is a filmmaker feels just right: he has built a life and career on seeing the world’s ugliness, while pushing away what feels ugly inside.
The end of the film is decisive, a moment for border-crossing, and there’s a palpable sense of relief, even entwined with guilt. “Oh, Canada” functions like a coda to Schrader’s most recent trilogy. The question here is not “Will God forgive us?” Rather, it asks: “Will God — or someone, anyhow — forgive me?”
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