Oh, Canada ★★★1/2

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Another Life

Almost 50 years after giving us the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), Paul Schrader has delivered another masterpiece, this time as writer (based on the 2021 novel “Foregone” by Russell Banks) and director. It would be easy to pigeon-hole the film as the narcissistic, rambling regrets of an aging guru of the cinema, and there may be some of that (for now, only Schrader knows), or to see it as a last-gasp effort at a “career” statement, an introverted version of Francis Ford Coppola’s recent “Megalopolis.” It is neither. “Oh, Canada” is a mature, complex, wonderfully assembled, and ultimately mysterious piece of work. Schrader, nominated for the Cannes Palme d’Or for “Oh, Canada,” returns to form here, recuperating from his flaccid 2022 “Master Gardener.”

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“Oh, Canada” is a mature, complex, wonderfully assembled, and ultimately mysterious piece of work.

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The film is structured around an interview (what could seem less compelling!) of Leonard Fife (a cantankerous, red-eyed Richard Gere), a 78-year-old documentary filmmaker of some fame in Canada, where he has lived since 1968, when he fled the United States, ostensibly to avoid being drafted to serve in Vietnam. Fife, in a wheelchair, is dying of cancer, coming apart physically and maybe mentally too, and the interview—conducted at his insistence—takes place over a long day in the dark, wood-paneled confines of his Montreal apartment. Like many actors, he wants to use the wall of the camera and microphone to help him say what he has had trouble saying all his life. An attractive younger woman (Penelope Mitchell) assisting with the filming serves to reveal the indignities of old age. “What does she smell in me…dried feces on my ass?” Fife ruminates.

Right, dying Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) ruminates on a decision he made when he was a callow youth (Jacob Elordi)--though already twice married and with children, merging his two selves into an exploration of memory.

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Most of the flashbacks seem to be his own reflections; others are used to fill in the script. Few can be taken entirely at face value.

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It’s clear that Leonard thinks he wants to tell the “truth” about his life, especially for his third wife, of many years, Emma (Uma Thurman), present on the set by his demand and emotionally fragile. (Thurman’s character is played quite flatly; it’s hard to believe from Thurman, but she has almost no real presence.) That “truth,” such as it is, is told through Leonard’s real-time words during the interview, but also through a series of flashbacks, some in an unrealistic ‘60s technicolor, some in present day film color, and some in black-and-white, most, but not all, drawn from his life as a very young man, living in the States. Most of the flashbacks seem to be his own reflections; others are used to fill in the script. Few can be taken entirely at face value.

Although at 78 Fife—and Schrader, of course—has a lengthy career to recall and reconsider, there’s little of that here, with one exception: Leo’s acknowledgement that his emergence as a respected documentary filmmaker was a matter of contingency. An unexpected stint laboring on a New Brunswick farm, and a fascination with the artistic atmospheres emanating from crop-dusting, result in a cutting-edge documentary on Agent Orange. “Suddenly, I was a documentary filmmaker, and then I was a great documentary filmmaker.”

Young Leo Fife takes his car to the Canadian border, and there makes a fateful decision, one he has trouble living with, even 60 years later.

The title of the film suggests that Fife’s confessional will focus on his draft-dodging, and one scene in the film—some combination of memory and filmic truth—has Fife at a T intersection, a sign showing the United States to the left and Canada to the right. But if Fife regrets not serving (and he seems to), it’s also apparent that his classification—1Y—would not have required military service. That fateful turn to the right was about something else: the desire for “another life.” That’s the “deathbed confession” he seems to be engaged in, and for which he wants absolution from his wife.

At age 19 or 20, the callow Leo (Jacob Elordi, “Saltburn,” 2023) hardly knew what that other life would be. He’s writing a novel, but (if his confessional memory is any indication), he doesn’t seem to be a naturally creative person. He’s got a wife who just had a late miscarriage, a two-year-old son, and an offer of a job from his oily father-in-law in Richmond (some version of “plastics” ala 1967’s “The Graduate”), none of which seems to suit whatever he is or wants. In a 1998 scene that may reflect his truth-telling during the interview, or just Schrader filling in Fife’s reality for us, his son shows up, having been abandoned 30 years earlier—a fact of which Emma may, or may not, have been aware. He may have yet another ex-wife and an abandoned daughter.

One scene, repeated three times and shot in that ‘60s technicolor, shows him at a car rental counter, explaining to the agent that he has a good job teaching at Goddard College, where he’s headed, and that he’s about to buy a house, downpayment check in pocket. The road he was supposed to have taken. We’ll see him not long after his arrival at his best friend’s house in Plainfield, Vermont, having sex with the man’s wife, Gloria (also played by Uma Thurman), either in reality or in his addled memory. We’ll see him a decade or two later (in black and white) teaching in Canada, explaining to students (including future wife Emma) in his film seminar that the iconic photograph of the assassination of a Viet Cong soldier freezes the moment in time, the soldier always alive and always being shot. Or, as Emma comments, always dying. Leo’s nightmare. One of Leo’s nightmares.

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Fife is more than simply the unreliable narrator, perhaps intending to be absolutely honest but not sure what that involves.

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Above all, “Oh, Canada” is a meditation on truth, on memory. Fife is more than simply the unreliable narrator, perhaps intending to be absolutely honest but not sure what that involves, imagining himself ready to be clear and forthright, but also an old man, not incapable of hallucinating (imagining himself in the same place, at different ages) and, by his own admission, sometimes confused. Gere is at his best here, in a powerful film that speaks to the human condition—to the virtual impossibility of knowing the self, while desperately wanting to do so. Gripping from beginning to end.

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He says: A Richard Gere you've never seen.

She says: I was surprised that a film about a dying man's interior ruminations could be gripping, but that was the word I used when it ended.

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Date: 2024

Director: Paul Schrader

Starring: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Penelope Mitchell

Country: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 91 minutes

Other Nominations: 1 (for the Palme d’Or)