RICHARD GERE, UMA THURMAN IN OH, CANADA

PAUL SCHRADER: OH, CANADA (2024) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Schrader's reportedly very personal second Russell Banks adaptation is a confusing misfire

The novel Foregone by Russell Banks, who died last year, which forms the basis for Oh, Canada, concerns an accomplished documentary filmmaker at the end of his life who's sitting for a documentary to celebrate him. This is Schrader's second Banks-derived fllm after the troubling and much more successful 1998 Affliction. In the book the new Banks adaptation is based on that protagonist, Leonard Fife, hijacks this project from the students and acolytes working on it to focus it exclusively on a confession of his past sins, to air a lifetime of ugly secrets and demythologize himself. In Schrader's version, this reversal gets somewhat lost, and thus the film loses much of the book's point as well as the logic that holds the story together. This despite good performances headed by the rarely seen Richard Gere, and, playing the young Fife, Jacob Elordi. It is said that this film is perhaps Schrader's most personal story yet, and perhaps that is part of the problem, because Banks was not writing about Schrader in his book.

Amid much that is muddled, What emerges clearly is that Fife, who has terminal cancer, is in bad shape now: he describes for us some of the ugly details of his present condition, though it doesn't seem to stop him from relentlessly pursuing the shooting, repeatedly refusing to take breaks or resume next day. And as he has some of his former students to film him, he wants to have control. He also insists that his wife and former student Emma (Umma Thurman) always be present because his revelations are for her.

In this Schrader version of the story the editing into nonlinear flashbacks makes the unfolding of chronology and recounting of events constantly confusing. It's suggested that Fife himself is confused. And perhaps he is indeed to some extent delirious. But we do not know, because the point is he is telling things Emma doesn't know about him. And whether the stories are correct or not, Fife leaves many of his narratives uncompleted. It is a dubious decision by Schrader sometimes to have Gere enter into the flashbacks of the young Fife replacing Elordi. At one point old Fife converses in bed with young Fife's pregnant second wife (Kristine Froseth), a dubious choice.

While the topic of guilt and confession is something forever germane to Paul Schrader's interests, he strays markedly in this film from the hotheaded moral absolutism of much of his work. But multifaceted grays ill suit him. He lacks the nuance and precision required. As can sometimes happen with film adaptations, this is a case where the film might be a suggestive supplement to a reading of the book but certainly not a substitute. Watching the film ignorant of the book, one is constantly being led astray or left dangling.

We learn that Fife is noted for exposés of subjects including Agent Orange, sexual abuse in the clergy and illegal seal-hunting, but we never get a picture of him working on these projects that came after in the Sixties he moved to Canada. This movie too is a source of confusion because, it seems, if that sequence is true, that he did not flee the Vietnam War draft with the thousands of others who did so, but reported to a draft board and fooled the examiner into deferring him for being homosexual. Or is this a fantasy, since he thinks of going to Cuba but gets no further than Florida? Apparently the interview takes place in Montreal, but an early flashback shows when Fife first went to Canada he was told not to stay there, in Montreal, because his one year of high school French leaves him quite unprepared for Québecois life.

This is one of the more confusing and jumbled films Schrader has made. It cannot be recommended.

Oh, Canada 91 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2024, also showing at Toronto, San Sebastián, Baltic Film Festival, and at New York, where it was screened for this review. Also Woodstock. Opening in the US Dec. 6, 2024. Metacritic rating: 5̶9̶%̶. 65% . A Kino Lorber release.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.