Bringing Out the Dead

My thoughts on Oh, Canada

On paper, Oh, Canada is a film that seems to have everything going for it. It is written and directed by Paul Schrader, one of the most reliably interesting voices in contemporary American film and one who has been on a bit of an artistic upswing in the last view years thanks to such films as First Reformed, The Card Counter and the uneven-but-ambitious The Master Gardener. It is based on a novel by the late Russell Banks, whose work Schrader previously adapted successfully with the haunting 1997 drama Affliction. It stars Richard Gere, whose previous collaboration with Schrader was the 1980 hit American Gigolo. Perhaps most significantly, the subject matter involves a number of subjects and issues that clearly resonate deeply with Schrader and where he is at this point in his life. And yet, despite all of that, Oh, Canada is a miss, a surprisingly muddled affair that has a promising start but grows somewhat monotonous once it becomes apparent that it has no real idea of what it wants to say about its characters or the issues that it raises throughout.

Gere plays Leonard Fife, an American who elected to avoid being sent overseas to fight in Vietnam by abandoning his wife and unborn child and fleeing to Canada with the money that his rich father-in-law gave him to buy a house in Vermont. Once there, he eventually became a celebrated political documentarian as well as a teacher. Decades have passed and now Leonard, now on his deathbed from an aggressive form of cancer, has inexplicably agreed to face the cameras himself by agreeing to be interviewed for a film on his life being made by a few of his former students led by the opportunistic Malcolm (Michael Imperioli). Leonard’s wife, Emma (Uma Thurman)—a former student of Leonard’s herself—is wary of the project in general and Malcolm’s motives in particular and wants to scrap the whole thing. Not only does Leonard want to do it, he wants Emma to be there in the room for the whole thing because he vows to come clean about his entire life and the mythologizing that has built up around it over the decades, promising to reveal things that even Emma apparently doesn’t know.

In a series of non-chronological flashbacks that veer between black-and-white and color and which find the younger version of Leonard being played at some points by Jacob Elordi and at other times by Gere sans the makeup designed to make him look older in the present-day scenes, Leonard ruminates on a lifetime in which his celebrated artistic achievements have become intertwined with the failures in his personal life. We learn that at the age of 18, he planned to defy his conservative parents by taking off for Cuba, though he never quite made it. We learn that before the marriage that he abandoned when he fled to Canada, there was an earlier marriage that produced a son before he fled that one. We see the circumstances that led to his fateful decision to go to Canada, particularly an interlude with an artist friend in Vermont where he winds up sleeping with the man’s depressed wife (played by Thurman) in the wake of receiving bad personal news. As the truth-telling continues and Leonard begins to falter before Malcolm’s camera, Emma wants to stop the whole thing, insisting that the stories he is telling are hallucinations brought on by his pain medication—though she then seems confirm that at least some of what he says is true by recounting the time that she and Leonard crossed paths with the estranged son from that first marriage.

Schrader’s last three films formed what some have dubbed the “Man in a Room” trilogy—a series of films in which outwardly serene but inwardly tortured men try to take stock of their lives and the existential turmoil lurking within them at key inflection points in their existence. In some ways, Oh, Canada feels like an extension of that particular conceit but this particular iteration prove to be far less satisfying than its predecessors. For starters, while the notion of seeing a man on his deathbed taking stock of his life and challenging and upending the conventional assumptions about the things he has done while he still has the chance, regardless of who it may hurt, sounds potentially rich and enlightening from a dramatic perspective, it never quite clicks here. Leonard’s private life, as recounted, is one long series of betrayals that, as depicted, are not particularly interesting and do not build to any sort of notable dramatic payoff, partly because they all kind of blend into one another after a while and partly because the film, which clocks in at a surprisingly slim 94 minutes, rushes through everything so quickly that none of it ends up making much of an impact. Perversely, at a point when it seems as if half the movies coming out could easily stand to lose 15-20 minutes without losing much of anything in the process, here is one movie that I suspect would have benefitted from a longer running time.

To be fair, some of the confusion that arises during the flashbacks, which take up a good chunk of the film, appears to be deliberate—while the swapping out of Gere for Elordi may seem arbitrary at time, it eventually suggests that the flashback scenes with Elordi are memories in which Leonard’s drug-induced confusion and penchant for self-deception are at his strongest while the ones with Gere are more grounded in what really happened, perhaps as a way of reminding us that even those who have decided to take stock of their lives may still be lying to themselves and others on some fundamental level. However, Schrader never really seems all that involved to the material and the ideas surrounding it, which is weird because the concept of a revered artist contemplating the meaning of his life and work as well as his own mortality seems tailor-made for him. For a filmmaker who has rarely gone about making a film that didn’t resonate with him on some deeper level (even a seemingly crass commercial endeavor like his remake of Cat People was transformed into something utterly unique and personal), the sense of disconnect on display throughout is deeply mystifying.

The central performance by Gere is also a bit of a disappointment as well. On the surface, he is okay and is certainly game during the present-day scenes to allow his celebrated features to show the ravages of time, guilt and the disease that is killing him without regards to vanity. The problem is that his work doesn’t dig down to really give us a sense of who Leonard is and what, outside of the mechanics of the plot, drove him to the acts that brought pain to so many people throughout his life and to his attempts to purge himself of the attendant guilt with the knowledge that the end of his entire existence is coming soon. This is particularly frustrating because Gere has grown into an increasingly powerful actor as he has grown older, but Schrader doesn’t seem interested in tapping into that gravitas for the most part. Likewise, the other performers are okay but don’t really get a chance to delve into their parts in meaningful ways thanks to the undercooked script.

Oh, Canada is not a particularly good movie but it is not entirely without merit. Even with his weaker efforts (and this one certainly qualifies), a Paul Schrader film almost always has a few striking moments and he once again demonstrates his stubborn determination to follow a cinematic path that practically everyone else has long since abandoned in today’s hit-driven industry. And yet, it is because of his undeniable talent and his willingness to present dark explorations of the human psyche—often horrifying and eminently recognizable in equal measure—in emotionally unsparing and formally audacious ways, even at this late stage of his career, that makes this effort seem particularly forced and unconvincing by comparison. Trust me, there are far worse movies that are either currently playing or are just about to be released—including a couple that have received lavish, if inexplicable, praise—but if I had to name the most disappoint of the bunch, this would rank near the top.