By Sandra Hall
OH, CANADA ★★★
(M), 91 minutes
Paul Schrader’s most memorable films are about guilt. He first made his mark in the 1970s and ’80s with his work on the scripts for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. All these films bore signs of Scorsese’s acute case of Catholic guilt together with Schrader’s equally enduring hangover from his strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing.
Despite a cast including Richard Gere and Uma Thurman Oh, Canada is ultimately let down by the writing.Credit: Transmission Films
And he’s too old to change now. Oh, Canada offers more of the same. Written and directed by Schrader, it’s the lugubrious story of Leo Fife (Richard Gere), a dying filmmaker being interviewed about his life and work for a biographical documentary. It should be a valedictory exercise but it’s shaping up as a final confession of his sins, delivered specifically to his wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), who has been told to sit beside the camera.
Schrader has never seemed to need much encouragement to lapse into a sombre mood when making a film but this time he had extra incentives. He decided to write the screenplay – an adaptation of a book by his longtime friend Russell Banks – after learning that Banks had cancer. He had also been considering his own mortality while in hospital suffering from long COVID.
Writer-director Paul Schrader with actor Jacob Elordi on the set of Oh, Canada.Credit: Transmission Films
In the opening scene, Gere looks convincingly close to death but with the help of his nurse, he manages to rise from his bed, dress and settle into a wheelchair. His interviewers, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and his partner, Diana (Victoria Hill), are both his former students, and it’s soon clear from his sniping that Malcolm was never one of his favourites. Nonetheless, he starts talking and the flashbacks roll out in what seems to be no particular order, with the young Leo played by Australian Jacob Elordi.
When we first meet him, he’s in Virginia in the middle of his second marriage. His wife, Alicia (Kristine Froseth), is pregnant and they have a two-year-old son – he’s soon to abandon them both because of the stifling influence of his in-laws.
Richard Gere with Kristine Froseth, who plays the younger version of his wife in Oh, Canada.Credit: Transmission Films
It’s his second big betrayal, we learn. He’s already walked out on his first wife after cheating on her. It is to become an established pattern.
Canada is the place to which he escapes in a successful bid to evade the Vietnam draft, although he hasn’t been entirely honest about that either – or about the beginnings of his film career.
He is supposed to have made his breakthrough by uncovering news of the military’s use of Agent Orange, but he now reveals that political idealism had nothing to do with this exposé and that the truth offers yet more proof of his lack of character.
It’s a damning list of flaws but Schrader doesn’t make it very easy to piece the jigsaw together. At times, he seems to be deliberately confusing us. In one early sequence featuring Elordi, for example, Gere briefly takes over the role, as if the older Leo is paying a mysterious visit from the future.
In the end, the fragmentary shape of it all fails to invite any emotional investment in Leo or his story. The other characters wander in and out of his life like passengers glimpsed through the windows of a passing train. And even Thurman’s role is underwritten. Emma is another of her husband’s former students, but all we see is her wish to put an end to the revelations and the filming.
She prefers to believe that his memory is addled by painkillers. And perhaps she’s right, but there’s no doubting his determination. Schrader is bent on demonising him, and if he’s exaggerating his sins, so be it.
In cinemas from March 27.
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