‘Oh, Canada’ Review – Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi Are One Troubled Man

A frequent complaint that never makes sense is when people lament that an artist explores the same themes throughout their entire career. “Why won’t they switch it up and tackle something new?” In my mind, there are more than enough artists for each to have their own singular preoccupations they return to endlessly in their practice. Why would I want them to explore something outside of this? That seems like a surefire path to inauthenticity.

Paul Schrader’s early encounters with Robert Bresson’s work led to a career as a screenwriter, director, and film critic who returns again and again to guilt-ridden solitary men who attempt to resolve their past sins on their own. Raised in a conservative Calvinist household in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Schrader’s work deems any such attempt impossible: seeking absolution without the assistance of a higher power is doomed from the start. It’s why his narratives typically end either bloody or with the protagonist jailed. Guilt is unique in that it is not unique—nearly every Western religion lays claim to it: Jewish guilt, Protestant guilt, Catholic guilt. Schrader makes a strong case on behalf of Protestant guilt with a nearly 50-year career probing its destructive effects. He returns once again to this well, in perhaps his most personal story yet, with Oh, Canada.

‘Oh, Canada’ Reunites Schrader with Richard Gere

Oh, Canada stars Richard Gere as Leo Fife, an aging documentarian who has gathered a few of his former filmmaker students, Malcolm and Diana (Michael Imperioli and Victoria Hill), and his wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), to set the record straight on camera. As he goes through his life beat-by-beat—the lingering destination always his role as a draft dodger who fled to Canada to escape Vietnam—the film flashes back to a young Fife, played by Jacob Elordi.

Gere is not a movie star we often see anymore, and he’s a welcome sight whenever he appears. I caught him last in the underrated 2016 drama Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. His leading role as Leo Fife in Oh, Canada is a warts-and-all performance that could translate to awards buzz. Close to death, Fife coughs violently and spits up on himself, wears diapers, and openly discusses the shit that clings to his ass. He’s demanding—despite it not being his own film set, he has no qualms running it like it is. It’s impossible not to envision him as a surrogate for Schrader, with the filmmaker’s features swapped for Fife’s political documentaries. Gere even resembles Schrader, with the unshaven white stubble and respiratory issues.

Gere and Schrader first teamed up in 1980 on American Gigolo, an icy cold neo-noir that helped kick both their careers into full swing and inspired future artists like Bret Easton Ellis. This was the first time Schrader borrowed the ending of Bresson’s Pickpocket, a visual motif he has returned to many times in his career, most recently with 2021’s The Card Counter. American Giglio was so mutually beneficial for both men, that you might have expected them to reteam to see if the magic could strike again, but then again Schrader isn’t a director known for having actor muses throughout his career.

‘Oh, Canada’ Benefits From Its Music and Visuals

A decade since breakout album Muchacho, Schrader taps singer-songwriter Phosphorescent to score Oh, Canada. It gives the film a nice ’70s energy, similar to when singer-songwriters like Kris Kristofferson would score films with original tracks. It’s not the most timely or hip choice of artist, but no one faults boomer filmmakers for that, especially when his compatriots are still putting Creedence Clearwater Revival over Vietnam footage.

Oh, Canada is lensed by cinematographer Andrew Wonder, who has two prior features to his name, one notably with director Michael Almereyda. It felt like Schrader was building something visually with DP Alexander Dynan, who shot his last four films digitally. Still, Oh, Canada’s visuals are serviceable. The time jumps to the past and back involve frequent aspect ratio shifts, which is the film’s singular flashy impulse. It’s a formally assured film, classy and measured in its approach, not as icy and digitally striking as those recent Dynan-shot films. Oh, Canada aims for elegance above all else and, when considering the film was shot in a short 17 days, the strength of the visuals is impressive, if not particularly unique.

Schrader’s subversion of his trademark bleakness recently indicates a possible softening, beginning with First Reformed. Regardless of what you think happens to Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) in those final moments, it’s undoubtedly a romantic gesture that values love above all. The question of that film was “Will God forgive us?” for destroying his creation. And Schrader has answered optimistically in interviews that he believes the answer is yes. After that, he was back to his signature Pickpocket ending with Oscar Isaac accepting his place back in prison after torturing and killing Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). But next up in Master Gardener, Joel Edgerton’s former Neo-Nazi Narvel Roth gains retribution against the drug dealers ruining Maya’s life, but it’s less violent than he (or Schrader for that matter) normally gets. Instead, Roth chooses an idyllic life with Maya over self-destruction. Again, a Schrader protagonist can’t help but choose love. And now we reach Oh, Canada, where Fife wants to confess his laundry list of moral failings in order to feel at peace before he dies. No bloodshed needs to spill in addition. A natural, undignified, wheezing death will suffice. It’s a nice change of pace and could only be written by a Schrader who is also reflecting on his mortality and the life in pictures and relationships he’s left behind.

‘Oh, Canada’ Has an Expansive Script

As Fife works through the details of his early life, his wife Emma is in the same room but also present front and center in an Errol Morris-type Interrotron screen at Fife’s insistence. This allows Fife to confess directly to her. As an audience, without a frame of reference for the truth as Fife, Emma and the documentary crew understand it, some of these confessions become hard to follow. We just don’t possess enough reference for the actual truth and how it might’ve gotten twisted over the years. The first confession involves a pregnant first wife who Fife abandoned and then a son he later refused to acknowledge. This is not an ideal skeleton in anyone’s closet, but the way this is revealed for Emma and the others in the room is handled peculiarly. Emma’s first instinct is that Fife is senile and conflating someone else’s story. This is an interesting angle the film tries to explore but never fully commits to. Fife seems of sound mind and the flashbacks we get with Elordi seem to confirm Fife’s accounting. A more dialed-in script might present differing visions of Fife’s story with what he’s saying versus what we see with Elordi—that could more effectively muddy the storytelling waters. But this version is too straightforward for the senile misremembering narrative to be taken seriously.

Gere’s performance here in this room as the cranky, hyper-intelligent, no-nonsense Fife is the centerpiece of the film. Here is a dignified person grappling with the inherent indignity of dying. But he finds his voice and control by telling his story straight. At one point, his voiceover reasons in real time that Malcolm is sleeping with his young production assistant on the shoot. He feels genuine sorrow for Malcolm’s wife Diana, since she’s always been the more talented one of the married filmmaking pair. And now she’s producing for Malcolm when she should be directing her own work. It’s interesting to see the notoriously unfiltered Schrader (whose Facebook postings are a must-read for any cinephile) acknowledge this level of industry sexism in such a subtle manner.

Later, in an actual senile moment, he openly calls Malcolm a fraud. It’s heartbreaking to watch Malcolm take this in, as he clearly sensed over the years that Fife feels this way. He brushes it off as best he can, but the damage is done and the embarrassment for everyone in the room is palpable. These moments make us long for a film that rarely, if ever leaves this enclosed documentary set. It’s when Oh, Canada travels to the past, with Elordi’s Fife, that it plays out a little too conventional in its storytelling form.

Schrader’s Fife Is Not His Usual Classic Character in ‘Oh, Canada’

Another issue is that these sins are fairly tame, all things considered. Fife is mostly a selfish womanizer who has no qualms about moving on when the moment benefits him. He’s not a good person by any means, but the film fails to make a strong enough case for how his confessions might impact his current relationship with Emma, his students, and his audience. Plenty of artists do terrible things in this particular arena and are never held to account. Daniel Day-Lewis broke up with actress girlfriend Isabelle Adjani via fax when he learned she was pregnant. Tom Brady (not an artist, but almost), left his pregnant girlfriend, Bridget Moynahan. This isn’t to put these two on blast but to simply point out that despite this being objectively bad behavior, we don’t dwell on this like we might other sins. And so, the heightened outrage that follows Fife’s confessions feels insincere.

This is the writer-director whose prior protagonists harbored secrets of torturing “enemy combatants” at Abu Ghraib or were hitmen in a Neo-Nazi gang. Forgive me for believing that a simple case of adultery and child abandonment isn’t sufficient enough a sin to befit a classic Schrader protagonist. There’s a formalness to it all in Oh, Canada, and as a longtime Schrader fan, I suspect I’m not alone in preferring he trade these classical pretenses for one last spin with Grindhouse Paul. First Reformed was the perfect synthesis of the slow cinema from his college film critic days and the sleazy violence of the long career that followed. Oh, Canada is too buttoned up with a first-draft script to be more than a curiosity when stacked against Schrader’s odder, more fearless oeuvre.

Oh, Canada is now playing in theaters.

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Oh, Canada

REVIEW

Oh, Canada is a more reflective work from Paul Schrader with plenty on its mind that still falls short of his best works.

Pros

• Schrader offers a nice change of pace from some of his prior works in terms of its reflections on dying, making what may just be his most personal film yet.
• Richard Gere reunites with the director and gives a great performance, proving to be a potential contender come awards’ season.
• The strength of the visuals are impressive, even if they are not particularly unique.

Cons

• The recollections of the film are explored in too straightforward a manner, making it hard to know what is misremembering and what isn’t.
• The film is too buttoned up, especially when placed alongside some of Schrader’s more fearless prior films.

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