Oh, Canada review — A five-star gift of a film
With incredible performances by Richard Gere, Uma Thurman and Australia’s Jacob Elordi, this film had a profound effect on me. When it ended I needed to sit in the cinema for quite a while to gather myself.
Oh, Canada (M)
91 minutes
In cinemas
★★★★★
We all have films that speak to us directly and personally. Perhaps a character shares our hidden fears or harbours our secret dreams. Watching them on screen is like living your life in the past, present or future. There’s that comfort in knowing you are not alone in your feelings.
Oh, Canada, written and directed by American filmmaker Paul Schrader and with incredible performances by Richard Gere, Uma Thurman and Australia’s Jacob Elordi, is such a film for this viewer. It is the most emotionally draining movie experience I have had.
Afterwards I pondered if this was due to time of life at which I have arrived. The main character, 80-year-old award-winning Montreal-based American documentarian Leonard Fife (Gere), is dying of cancer.
I’m not near 80 but I’m nearer to it than 20 and I wonder if a 20-year-old viewer will find Fife as personal as I do? Ditto for Emma (Thurman), his third wife, who has been with him for 30 years. I think it’s possible.
I asked my near 20-year-old son about this. I mentioned that when I was in my teens I read Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case and related to the main character, a burnt-out architect in his mid-50s.
My son replied that everyone can relate to failure. He’s yet to see Oh, Canada but that remark hit home. The burning question of the film is whether the celebrated Fife is a failure, professionally and personally. It’s a question he asks himself. “When you have no future all you have left is your past,’’ he says. “And if your past is a lie like mine … you are a fictional character.”
His wife contends that his medications are messing with his mind and his recollections are “misremembered or half-invented”. He replies that this final testament, this confession, “is a gift to you, my love”.
He adds that he is revealing aspects of his life, of his person, that she does not know, and “some I don’t even know myself”. He continues: “This is my final prayer and whether or not you believe in God, you don’t lie when you pray.”
Lines such as the above go to the brilliance of the script, which Schrader adapted from the 2021 novel Foregone by American writer Russell Banks. They are delivered so truly by all the actors. Schrader’s CV includes writing Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). He last made a film with Gere in 1980, writing and directing American Gigolo.
Professor Fife makes his confession in front of a camera in his apartment in Montreal. It is closing on Christmas 2023.
Two former students at the university at which he taught, who have gone on to be Oscar-winning filmmakers, are making a documentary about his life and work.
In a lovely touch, when one of them, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), meets him he bows and kisses the master’s hand. Deliberate or not, it’s a nod to The Sopranos (1999-2007), the television show in which Imperioli made his name.
The other student is Diana (Australian actor Victoria Hill). Malcolm tells Fife the documentary will be “a protege’s homage … to a career that is an emblem of political filmmaking”.
Fife, who speaks to the camera from a wheelchair, as his wife and his nurse look on, has other ideas. “The story begins” in 1968, he tells them. “That’s when the poisonous flower first bloomed.” This takes us into Fife’s backstory, where he is mainly played by Elordi, who alongside Margot Robbie are the Australian stars of their generation. Look for Elordi soon in the television adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s 2013 Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
I say mainly because there are backstory moments when Gere, aged and grey, plays his younger self. It should look odd but it doesn’t. This is a man in his last hours not just remembering but reinhabiting his former life. In doing so it shows his flaws as a filmmaker, husband and father.
Fife’s official CV includes that he travelled to Cuba in the spirit of the revolution, went on a Jack Kerouac road trip to discover himself, left the US for Canada to dodge the draft during the Vietnam War, and then made Michael Moore-ish documentaries that rocked the world.
How much of this, though, is the fictional character he admits to? Viewers will find out. At one point his wife says he thinks he is “a coward who never loved anyone”. Asked by the filmmakers if that is true, she says it is not. Thurman is superb as a woman learning some hard truths for the first time. The final words he says to her are beyond beauty, as is their discussion of intimacy.
The title, Oh, Canada, refers to the Canadian national anthem, O Canada. In the context of this film, that added “h” is crucial.
As I said at the outset, this film has had a profound effect on me. I wept during it. When it ended I needed to sit in the cinema for quite a while to gather myself. It may not have the same impact on other viewers, but that is the nature of art, and of life.
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