‘Oh Canada’ Review: Proxy Richard Gere is Superb as Paul Schrader Points the Camera at Himself | Cannes

A Venice mainstay himself, Schrader premiered his newest chamber piece, Oh Canada in this year’s Cannes Competition and after The Card Counter’s elegant harshness and the well-measured naivete of Master Gardener comes a small scale film with a big, big heart. Based on the Russell Banks’s recent novel “Foregone,” Oh Canada may be verbose, but its rather minimalist set-up assures all the feelings are nicely boxed up, until they can no longer be contained. Schrader’s 1997 film Affliction was also a Banks adaptation and it’s no wonder that Oh Canada—a melancholy eulogy of a life lived and one unlived—is dedicated to the late American author and friend of who passed away in January 2023. 

American documentarian Leonard Fife (played by Richard Gere at old age and Jacob Elordi in the flashbacks) has all the markers of a legacy filmmaker: an aura of reverence, moodiness, and a strong urge to have the last word. The director, who has spent most of his life in Canada, is now in his late seventies and in his last days; we gather he’s in palliative care (at home) for a terminal cancer diagnosis. His home is his sanctuary and this makes it the most appropriate place for a documentary film about his life, a project initiated by his former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). Together with their assistant Sloan (Penelope Mitchell), the couple transforms one of the rooms of the Fife house into a small studio, positioning three cameras in a set-up apparently named after the director himself. Fife reluctantly agrees, but on one condition: that his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), also a former student who has been by his side for 20 years now, is present at all times. 

From this opening scene onward, they thread carefully and with respect, but there always comes a time for every documentarian—Leonard included—where they’re given the opportunity to push their subject towards something bigger and purer. An absolute truth, if you want, or whatever people mean by ascribing this phrase to documentaries in the first place. All of this is left unsaid, but exists in that directors’ triangle and the tensions brewing when those power relationships are being negotiated.

As a result, Oh Canada first appears to be a movie about filmmaking. Or, more precisely, one about directing. The meta-reading here is obvious—with Schrader directing a film about two directors directing their mentor who also wants to direct them—but it is also reductive. Apart from triangulating the directorial power between them, Schrader (and the novel) is as always, very aware how many shortcomings a position of control has. Pin it down on his Protestant upbringing which he has addressed (both implicitly and explicitly) in many of his films, from Hardcore to First Reformed, or on his experiences of being a screenwriter, a director, and a film critic, but Schrader has come to know these trappings well. Naturally, so do his characters; even Leonard from Banks’ novel. This is why he, too, lashes out while telling his life story. Narrating your past like that is also an attempt to regain control, or to (re)direct your life in the past tense.

It’s a curious paradox often found in elderly, frail people, whose temperament hastens with age while their bodies soften and fail, to become impatient to the point of rudeness. To see Richard Gere in a grumpy and sometimes spiteful role feels slightly confounding, especially for those who can superimpose the appealing softness he embodied Julian with in Schrader’s American Gigolo over Leonard’s pursed lips and narrow eyes. But Gere is able to evoke tenderness, especially when his character insists on confessing his early life and love affairs to his wife and the camera, as if they were one and the same measure of authenticity.

But Oh Canada is not just about filmmaking, it is a homage to storytelling as a lifeline. The central topic in the-film-within-the-film is Leonard’s life before moving to Canada at a young age to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. But while his reminiscing of previous wives and children he did and didn’t have is certainly a point of contention between him and Emma, there is something even more intriguing in this premise, than its salaciousness. 

Leonard is the unreliable narrator par excellence: he stops and starts, picks the story up at the wrong point, he messes things up; to match this, the film may start a flashback sequence with Elordi as the lead, but at some point cut back to the same memory with Gere in his place. Many people might note the differences in height between the actors as a dealbreaker, but Elordi appears tough and delicate at once, to the same degree as Gere does in his role. They may differ in many ways, including the former’s reliance on physical acting and the latter’s focus on facial expressions and line delivery, but they do compliment each other surprisingly well.

While it is not exactly a seamless transition in terms of looks, the way it’s implemented within the sequences gets to the core of how memory works. It is unreliable to begin with and oftentimes, when we get to tell a story of emotional charge in detail, we can see our present selves there too. There’s nothing more jarring and more beautifully fitting at the same time, thanks to cinema and the magic of continuity editing.  

Tuned to the soothing voice of American indie artist Phosphorescent and his gentle guitar, Oh Canada is an example of how the detours, not the destination, often end up shaping our lives. If you expect Leonard Fife to tell his life story and rise to fame within the film’s runtime, you might be disappointed: the narrative he shares is rather slim, chronologically speaking. But perhaps this is even more true to life than life itself. Perhaps, rather than what our story is or how long it is, what defines who we are is the way we tell it.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival where Oh Canada is playing in Competition. It has yet to secure U.S. distribution.