Oh, Canada Is a Puzzle Box Collage of a Life Lived

As director Paul Schrader explained to the audience of Alice Tully Hall, following the New York Film Festival premiere of his latest film, Oh, Canada had come about when the director had decided to put all his other projects on hold and helm an adaptation of a book written by his dying friend. The second adaptation of a Russell Banks novel (1999’s Affliction) and a moving final act of kindness, Oh, Canada is indeed dedicated to Banks. The author of the 2021 novel Foregone, upon which Schrader’s adaptation was based, Banks passed away in early January of 2023. So too is Oh, Canada a treatise on mortality, by way of a dying artist attempting to set the record straight on his complicated, controversial life. It’s no wonder why Schrader, an older artist whose life and career have been defined by a seemingly limitless series of controversies, took to bringing to the screen the story of Leonard Fife.

Fife (Richard Gere), a documentary filmmaker himself, is given the final chance on his deathbed to tell the world what really happened when he dodged the Vietnam War draft, deserted his wife and children for a new life in Canada, and began his acclaimed career exposing the world’s injustices. It’s possible that Schrader envisions a similar opportunity for himself before he passes, but he wouldn’t be alone in the human fear of not being able to speak on behalf of your life before it’s taken from you. It’s a shame, then, that Oh, Canada—Schrader’s first outing since the conclusion of his “Man in a Room” trilogy, and a reunion with his star of American Gigolo—is such a convoluted portrait, although that is certainly intentional. The ailing Leonard Fife is brought in front of a camera by former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), and Rene (Caroline Dhavernas), both now filmmakers themselves, all aided by Leonard’s wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), also a former student. No, flashbacks of the three of them learning from Leonard’s teachings do not use younger actors. Yes, you get Michael Imperioli in a backwards baseball cap à la Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock.

Leonard will not speak to the camera unless Emma is beside him, finding comfort in her presence as well as catharsis in being given an opportunity to finally reveal the things about his life that he’d kept from her. Of course, the more distressing bits that Leonard uncovers only gives Emma the excuse to blame it on his failing memory, which adds a wrinkle to a story that’s being told to the audience as well. Fife’s recounting of memories mirrors that of a declining consciousness struggling to reclaim itself. The easiest Point A to Point B story is told with continuous tangents, departures, and sidebars, until the story that Fife was asked to tell—what happened when he deserted Vermont for Canada—becomes something far more opaque. At first, Oh, Canada misdirects, setting itself up as if it’ll play out like a standard, fictional biopic. Jacob Elordi, who would otherwise tower over Gere, portrays young Leonard Fife as a father expecting his second child with his wife, Alicia (Kristine Froseth), all of them living with Alicia’s wealthy family in Richmond, Virginia. Attempting to coerce him with information about his secret first divorce and other child, Alicia’s father tries getting Leonard to stay in Virginia by also promising an executive position with the family company.

A tempting offer for some, it does nothing to hinder Leonard’s plans to relocate the family to Vermont, where he’s secured a teaching job, but Elordi’s boyish face and quiet voice accentuate the naivety of the character in his youth. He leaves solo, staying with a painter friend whose wife (also played by Thurman) Leonard ends up having a brief affair with. But when he’s first seen departing to the airport, a voiceover from his now-adult son, Cornel (Zach Shaffer), reveals that this scene will be the last time he sees his father for 30 years. The trip from Virginia to crossing the Canadian border is ultimately a short one, and Leonard instead litters his story with diversions, memories that may or may not be true or are ruptured in small ways. As Emma appears to Leonard in his past as the friend’s wife he slept with, Gere is occasionally swapped in for Elordi as his internal depiction of his younger self. The film alternates between a 4:33 aspect ratio in the present where Leonard is being interviewed, while filling up the screen when we dive into the past. This past additionally alternates between color and black and white, cinematography credited to Andrew Wonder.

It’s a way to further alienate the audience from the truth of the film. Sometimes it seems like the color sections are meant for the story Leonard’s supposed to be telling, black and white meant for the story he isn’t—like when he reveals a fight with his family over plans to flee to Cuba, and all the women he bedded but didn’t love until he met Emma. These bits greatly upset Emma, who spends most of the film trying to get Malcolm and Rene to stop filming and where her characterization is stubbornly brought to a halt. Emma is eager to chalk up Leonard’s past adulterer lifestyle on false memories that he’s creating in his rapidly dwindling present. But Leonard resents his status as an icon, for award-winning documentary films about Agent Orange and illegal seal-clubbing, for rebelling against an inhumane draft. Leonard “made a career getting the truth out of people,” and now feels that he’s been misrepresented to the world. He doesn’t want to be rendered a fictional character in his own story. “If your past is a lie, then you cease to exist,” Leonard’s inner monologue ruminates. The least everyone could do is grant him the dignity to die as the flawed man he feels that he was.

Of course, Leonard doesn’t really have any control over that in the end, does he? Oh, Canada is filled with these meditations that aren’t fully, meaningfully explored, and they feel far denser than a 95-minute runtime can allow them. In its fractured, difficult-to-follow portrait of a man desperate to remember who he was, we never get the full sense of who he was either. Nor do we get the sense of who anyone else is in the film, especially in its criminal underuse of Uma Thurman, who is largely reduced to the role of concerned wife (Thurman amusingly revealed at the NYFF Q&A her apprehensions, as a woman, about working with Schrader, which were assuaged after learning his love of Taylor Swift). Gere as Leonard is a muted, uncomplicated performance, which is not to knock on Gere; Schrader is correct in his blunt assertion that probably any suitable actor could have taken on the part instead.

Perhaps it’s part of the point that we are meant to be as withdrawn from Leonard’s true self as he is; a further articulation of what you lose as you age and as your past becomes something entirely untethered to you. In his class, Leonard offers, in response to the famous “Saigon Execution” photo, that images keep us immortal. Emma retorts that the man with the gun to his head is simply dying forever. It’s the contradiction inherent to Leonard’s filmed interview, and maybe what upsets Emma the most is that her husband will thus be immortalized in this state if he continues to go through with it. She doesn’t want him remembered as someone lesser than he truly was, but Leonard feels as if he’ll be remembered that way anyway. But one can’t help but come away from Oh, Canada without feeling like it isn’t worthy enough of what Paul Schrader has to say on his own subject, and maybe unlike Leonard Fife, he’s still alive enough to say it.

Director: Paul Schrader
Writer: Paul Schrader
Stars: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Kristine Froseth, Michael Imperioli, Caroline Dhavernas
Release date: Dec. 6, 2024

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.