Oh, Canada: hits the Schrader sweet spot between earnest autofiction and cynical critique
Richard Gere stars as a revered, terminally-ill documentary maker ruminating on his past in an excessively murky diaristic confessional from Paul Schrader.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
The Canada on display in Paul Schrader’s latest feature is less a country than a state of mind – the verdant, magic-hour manifestation of an American’s subconscious yearning for the moral high ground. It‘s the ‘true North strong and free’ sentiment literalised and beautified to the strains of some angelic electric guitar.
It’s a good bet that Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock influenced a key music cue in Oh, Canada, which is, at its core, an interrogation of the enduring countercultural mythologies of the 1960s and their fragile status in the present tense. On the eve of the Summer of Love, a writing teacher and would-be novelist named Leonard Fife (Jacob Elordi) finds himself at a crossroads between two alluring but fundamentally compromised life paths: either move his young family from West Virginia to a college town in Vermont – where he can potentially flex his literary muscles as a Kerouacian word-slinger – or else stay behind to run his father-in-laws’s million-dollar pharmaceutical business. Not-so-bravely sublimating his commitment-phobia beneath his leftward ideological leanings, our (anti?) hero chooses Door Number Three, decamping to Canada as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam.
Five decades later, Leonard (now played by Richard Gere) remains estranged from his homeland (and his now-adult son) while basking in his status as an critically acclaimed “artiste engagé.” His career churning out award-winning documentaries about such Canadian injustices as residential schools, sexual abuse in the Catholic church and seal clubbing have turned him into a kind of festival-circuit microcelebrity – so much so that a couple of his former students (Michael Imperioli and Diana Hill) have asked their mentor to star in a film about his life and times. Their pitch is that sitting for a documentary will make Leonard “as much of an icon as Glenn Gould,” and so, armed with a “contract from the CBC” (that’d be the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose Toronto headquarters are famously adorned by a statue of Gould), the directors journey to Montreal to film Leonard in his home, where the Great Man is staving off cancer pain one fentanyl patch at a time.
At first, Leonard’s much younger wife Emma (Uma Thurman) (herself a former protegé) is in favour of the project, but as the shooting proceeds, she worries that her husband’s fragmenting memory is undermining his testimony – or, worse, that he’s revealing secrets from his past so unflattering that they’ll ultimately destroy his legacy.
Oh, Canada is dedicated to the late Russell Banks, whose 2021 novel Foregone serves as Schrader’s basic narrative material. It’s difficult to watch the film without drawing a throughline between Leonard’s deteriorating condition and the author’s fatal battle with cancer – not to mention Schrader’s own well-publicised hospitalisation after contracting long COVID. There’s a certain elemental power to movies about death and dying made by artists who’ve stared them directly in the eye, and Leonard’s inner monologue, steeped in deadpan resignation and punctuated by rueful observations about his own declining hygiene and physical appearance, is vintage Schrader – a diaristic confessional minus the actual diary.
For a while, there’s enough pathos in the basic dramatic set-up – and also the conceptual coup of having Gere occasionally swap in for Elordi during the flashback sequences – that the script’s fussy puzzle-box narrative structure (which originated with Banks) more or less holds together, with some welcome melancholy seeping through the cracks. The idea of a professional truth-monger lost in the labyrinth of his own rationalisations and half-truths is compelling, but the tension between authenticity, objectivity and fantasy goes slack when the representation of all three feels mired in cliché, and Schrader’s direction, so clear-eyed and alert in First Reformed (2017) just seven years ago, is more miasmatic than the material requires.
It’s a fine line between Late Style and helpless camp, and Oh, Canada walks it less sure-footedly than one might hope, although there’s something to be said for Schrader’s refusal to kowtow to fashion: his essential iconoclasm makes him the right man to tell a certain kind of story, and if he happens to do it over and over again, so be it. For those who perceive this filmmaker – sympathetically and sometimes in spite of himself – as a stubbornly durable figurehead of personal-is-political cinema, Oh, Canada’s (self)-portrait of the artist as a man of deceptively contingent principles will hit the sweet spot between earnest autofiction and cynical critique. As for everybody else, it’s surpassingly unlikely that they’d even watch it in the first place.