Richard Gere’s Leonard Fife, the unreliable narrator at the core of Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada (Kino, $23.96 Blu-ray, $15.96 DVD), is seldom without a woman in his life. Yet he shares plenty in common with the brooding loners of the director’s recent de facto trilogy of First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener: the tendency toward self-flagellation, the lifetime of accrued guilt, the desire to escape a prison of one’s own construction.
As knotty and ornery as its protagonist, Oh, Canada is not as compelling a film as these past three, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsuccessful. It’s not meant to be liked. Most reckonings aren’t.
Stricken with terminal cancer, Leonard, a documentary filmmaker and professor of much renown, agrees to sit down for a final interview with two of his former students-turned-protégés, Malcolm and Diana (Michael Imperioli and Victoria Hill), who are making a doc on Fife’s life for the CBC. Under the gaze of Malcolm’s Interrotron camera — the device invented by Errol Morris that allows interviewer and interviewee to maintain eye contact throughout the process — Leonard hijacks the conversation, steering it away from his creative output and toward a rustling of the skeletons harbored in the capacious closet of his past.
Leonard’s recollections transpire in sundry flashbacks, as Schrader spelunks his character’s cavernous mind through a mishmash of formal collisions — shifting aspect ratios; jolting transitions from color to black-and-white; jarring cuts from Jacob Elordi, who plays the young Leonard, to Gere, who portrays him in adulthood, sometimes within the same scene. Memories blur. Timelines jumble. And we, like the increasingly frustrated Malcolm, cannot discern our subject’s repentances from his confabulations, though his third wife, Emma (Uma Thurman) tends to see through the mists of time, tearfully concluding that “he’s a coward, and he never loved anyone.”
More than any other feature from the 78-year-old Schrader, Oh, Canada is very much an old man’s film, one suffused with impending death. It’s based on the novelist Russell Banks’ penultimate book Foregone (2021), completed less than two years before Banks would die from cancer at 82. Schrader has said that he took inspiration from his own brushes with mortality, after he contracted long COVID and endured three hospitalizations. And not for nothing is his main character, like Schrader, a prickly director, albeit of the nonfiction stripe.
Therein lies one of the paradoxes of Leonard’s art and life: In his career, he was dedicated to the pursuit of truth, filming exposes of an abusive priest and of Dow Chemical’s development of Agent Orange, for just two examples. Yet, whether by wily intention or through the degradation of a diseased brain, he is an untrustworthy purveyor of information. We grasp at his various threads — his extramarital affairs and serial abandonments of his family, the miscarriage of his child, the literal turning of his back on his adult son, and his escape from Vermont to Canada to evade the draft during Vietnam — knowing that each of them is fraying into oblivion.
Oh, Canada is not without its issues. Intermittent voice-over narration from Zach Saffer as Leonard’s aforementioned eldest son, Cornel, feels random and disconnected from the movie’s central nervous system, because Schrader jettisons and revisits the conceit without much internal logic. And Leonard is such a nasty character that he’s sure to repel most audiences; Schrader has said that he amplified Leonard’s faults from Banks’ more softened source material.
But in reflecting on the movie for this review, I appreciate it more than in my immediate response as the credits rolled. It certainly lacks the intense emotionality of a masterpiece like First Reformed, and audiences may wish they were more invested in Leonard’s prismatic life. Oh, Canada is alienating, but this cerebral and complicated picture also exhibits many of the characteristics we say we want in movies for grown-ups. If it turns out to be the director’s final film, it’ll be an appropriately stubborn closing salvo in the career of one of film’s great uncompromisers.