Oh, Canada
Written and directed by Paul Schrader
Starring Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli, and Uma Thurman
Unrated
Runtime: 91 minutes
In select theaters December 6

by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

Buckle up, everybody: Paul Schrader is thinking about dying. It’s fair to say that Schrader has been thinking about dying for decades, probably, but his new film Oh, Canada, adapted by Schrader from the 2021 Russell Banks novel Foregone, puts it front and center in a quietly visceral way. Schrader collaborates with Richard Gere for the first time since American Gigolo, and the result is a contemplative, mournful, yet meditation on yes, death, but also memory, shame, and how we memorialize our artistic legends.

Richard Gere stars as Leonard Fife, a celebrated documentary filmmaker in palliative care. He is cared for by a nurse and by his wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), a younger woman who had once been his student. Fife has had a storied career since immigrating to Canada. A mythologized arrival as part of a wave of young American men avoiding the draft was followed by a long career as a documentarian, highlighting injustice and exploitation in his adopted homeland.

Now, as he nears death, two more former students (Michael Imperioli and Victoria Hill) have arrived to conduct a series of interviews, hoping to capture Fife’s thoughts on his legacy as a filmmaker. Instead, he’s preoccupied by his legacy as a man. He doesn’t want to talk about his awards or his methodology; he wants to unburden himself of all his shame and guilt, and he wants his wife to sit and witness it all, to finally understand who she married. Emma is resistant. She has not only been managing his care, she’s been cementing his legacy. According to her, the interview is a “postmortem,” and she worries that letting Fife hold court on the many regrets of his life will damage his reputation. As Fife dives in and starts detailing his life story, Emma insists that none of it will surprise her, that she knows her husband better than anyone.

The problem with interviewing a dying man in his seventies is that, well, you’re not always going to get the most accurate, linear story. Schrader doesn’t shy away from that, nor from the physical manifestations of the cancer that’s killing Fife. It’s not a serene, graceful passing, and Gere is not afraid of looking rough. Fife is frail, filled with phlegm and bile, and doing his best to accept the indignities of dying. The illness and its associated heavy duty medications takes its toll on Fife’s mind, too, resulting in confusion and messy timelines that bleed together in the visual language of the film. Textures and colors and aspect ratios shift as we visit different moments of Fife’s past, and Fife himself morphs from Richard Gere to Jacob Elordi.

Elordi is not always the Fife of the past. Sometimes Gere slips back in, as if the elder Fife is inserting his current self into his old life and walking around in it. Schrader uses this technique more than once by casting Uma Thurman as another important woman in Fife’s past. For the most part, however, Elordi is our Fife of the 60s, not so much a Gere lookalike but a great match for Gere’s confident handsomeness and louche vibe. Elordi has had a great couple of years, and he continues his streak of working with acclaimed directors in meaty roles. His Fife is sleepwalking through the expectations put upon him, like work and marriage and children. He wants more, and he wants to be interesting and artistic, and he doesn’t want to go to war. He needs to create the Leonard Fife we know in the future.

“When you have no future, all you have is the past,” the elder Fife says. “And if your past is a lie, like mine, then you can’t exist.” The various reveals of Fife’s past often feel a little bit underwhelming. They’re not great, but they’re also things that a lot of people have done throughout history. But the severity of Fife’s sins doesn’t ultimately matter. What matters is his feeling, at the end of his life, that he has never lived up to the public persona he built in Canada. The country represented freedom, safety, and the chance to create himself new. In return, he shed light on important societal problems, created art, and taught a new generation of documentary filmmakers. But it wasn’t enough, in Fife’s mind, to make up for the ways he abandoned his home country and the life he made there.

A generation of auteurs are in their seventies and eighties now, still working as they grapple with impending death. They’re taking big swings (hello, Megalopolis), finishing passion projects (also Megalopolis) and making statements about how they see their legacies. If this is Schrader’s statement, it’s wistful and pained, but still full of hope and love.