In Memoriam
By Jourdain Searles
Oh, Canada
Paul Schrader, U.S., Kino Lorber
Early in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, cancer-stricken filmmaker Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) recalls cheating on his first wife, Amy (Penelope Mitchell). In the memory, we see a young Fife (Jacob Elordi) and his mistress Amanda (Megan MacKenzie) in bed, while his older self watches through the window. That older Fife is also Gere, but he’s healthy, his image unburdened by the reality of his impending death. In the present, he’s balding, wheelchair-bound, and needs constant care from his nurse as well as his wife Emma (Uma Thurman). And yet, in his fragile condition, Fife agrees to an intimate interview conducted by his former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They approach the interview as an opportunity to highlight this Great Man of documentary cinema. Intended as a CBC exclusive, the interview would commemorate the life and career of a courageous draft dodger who escaped to Canada and changed the course of nonfiction filmmaking. But Fife rejects that narrative, choosing instead to tell the self-damning story of a man who ran away from his life, only to stumble into unearned success.
Ignoring Malcolm’s softball questions, Fife describes himself as an aimless, pretentious young man afraid of making good on any of his commitments. First, he was married to Amy and got her pregnant. Then, he cheats on her with Amanda. Eventually, he leaves them both to marry Alicia (Kristine Froseth), a nice girl from a well-off Southern family. They have a son, and she’s pregnant with another child when Fife drives off to Vermont to check out their new house. He’s got a professor position waiting for him there, and they plan to move when the school year starts. But Fife is restless and indecisive, terrified of the future that lies in front of him. Complicating matters is his father-in-law, who wants Fife to stay in the South and take over the family business. By the time he’s in Vermont, far away from his son, wife, and her family, he decides not to go back. He drives to Canada, leaves his car at the border, and enters a new life. He becomes an acclaimed documentarian, focusing on the environment and left-leaning causes, and eventually a professor, mentoring Malcolm, Diana, and even future wife Emma.
Isolated in a room with three of his most successful pupils and a camera, Fife makes a case against preserving his legacy. “I can’t tell the truth unless that camera is on and you are my witness,” Fife tells Emma with desperation in his voice. Throughout the film, Fife calls for Emma, insisting that she always sit within view so he can speak directly to her. As the interview continues, Emma struggles with listening to her husband speak so negatively about his past. She interrupts multiple times and tries to convince Malcolm and Diane that her husband doesn’t know what he’s saying. And even as Fife’s mind fades in and out, mixing up memories and losing his train of thought, there’s a sense that everything he saysis a version of the truth. While the film is mostly narrated by Fife, occasionally the voice of his son Cornel (Zach Shaffer) chimes in, despite the character rarely being onscreen. As his father recalls his past, it’s notable how little Cornel factors into it. Fife doesn’t wonder how his son—or the unnamed child from his first marriage—feels about the decisions he made. Even at the end of his life, sitting in judgment of himself, he can’t bear to discuss his greatest failing of all: he refused to be a father.
Oh, Canada, adapted from the novel Foregone by the late Russell Banks, is engrossing and confounding, telling a story that defies simple elucidation. Usually in Schrader’s films, the mode of confession is the diary. In his most recent films, First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardner, his protagonists are looking to change their lives in meaningful ways. They fight against their cynicism and self-loathing with the help and companionship of someone younger and more optimistic. Much like George C. Scott’s Jake Van Dorn in his sophomore 1979 feature Hardcore, the modern Schrader protagonist is aging and exhausted by the state of the world. But Oh, Canada takes things a step further, putting Gere’s Fife right at death’s door. It’s been more than 40 years since American Gigolo and Oh, Canada feels like the pairing of two old friends, jaded in similar ways. It feels right watching Gere in a Schrader film again, giving him his meatiest role in at least a decade. Maintaining the crass directness of Schrader’s younger characters, while adding the wisdom of his older ones, Gere plays Fife as a man who resents his charm and fading good looks. Schrader seems to be using Oh, Canada to comment on the men society tells us to look up to, both explicitly in life and implicitly through cinema. The film smartly uses Emma as the sole dissenting voice to Fife’s narrative. She is upset not just because she loves him but also because she has the most to lose. Her husband is dying, and she needs to remember him as a great man. Thurman plays Emma as a woman who hides all her doubts behind a steely exterior, playing the role of wife as if the camera is turned on her.
Oh, Canada is a messy film, moving backward and forward in time, switching from Elordi to Gere, changing aspect ratio, and sometimes going from color to black-and-white. The casting of Elordi as a young Gere lends a fantastical element to the narrative—their height difference alone is impossible to ignore. But Elordi is very much up to the task, playing Fife as a young man full of charm and romantic ideas about life and freedom. As the story goes on, he reveals himself as a scared little boy, trying to play fear off as bravery. Oh, Canada often feels like a journey through memory as it fades. Fife loses more and more of himself as he speaks as if the story contains all the energy he has left. Schrader underlines Fife’s unreliable memory by populating his narrative with doubles, blurring the lines between past and present. Thurman plays both Emma and Gloria, the wife of his old friend Stanley (Jake Weary) in Vermont and one of the last people he speaks to before leaving everything behind for Canada. Mitchell plays his ex-wife Amy and Sloan, a young intern helping Malcolm and Diane shoot the interview. Perhaps in Fife’s mind the women who challenged him all run together. It’s implied that Amy knew Fife didn’t love her, and Gloria, much like Emma, was a catalyst for change in his life. After meeting Gloria he chose to leave, but upon meeting Emma he decided to put down roots and commit. But did her love transform him, or was he simply older, more tired, and aware of his mortality?
There’s another Schrader film that comes to mind when pondering Oh, Canada: Affliction (1998), starring Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek, also adapted from a Russell Banks novel. Like Oh, Canada, Affliction was the story of a troubled, unhappy man haunted by his past. There’s a strikingly masculine melancholy to both films, each depicting a man’s emotional isolation that ices out the concern of the women in his orbit. When Thurman looks at Gere, pleading with him to stop tarnishing his legacy, it’s similar to the look Spacek gives Nolte right before she leaves him for good at the end of Affliction, taking his daughter with her. And yet, regardless of his self-loathing, Emma chooses to keep loving her husband. He abandoned his children and his other wives, but not her. Maybe he’s not a good person and never was, but he was good to her. Oh, Canada contemplates the very nature of legacy but stubbornly refuses to make any conclusions. True to life, there are no heroes and villains, only choices and their consequences.