Year: 2024

Runtime: 91 minutes

Written and directed by: Paul Schrader

Starring: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, Victoria Hill, Jacob Elordi, Kristine Froseth, Jake Weary, Penelope Mitchell, Caroline Dhavernas

By Sarah Manvel

There’s an enormous amount of art about men doing bad things, but there’s not a tremendous amount of art about men reflecting on the bad things they’ve done. Director Paul Schrader has always been the broad-shouldered type, interested in the kind of hard-living man for whom introspection does not come easily, so when it happens, we should stop and listen. He and the late novelist Russell Banks, who wrote repeatedly on similar themes, are a match made in heaven. Back in 1997 Mr Schrader’s adaptation of Mr Banks’ novel “Affliction” won James Coburn an Oscar. The character at the center of “Oh, Canada” (which Mr. Schrader adapted from Mr. Banks’ novel “Foregone”) is a documentary filmmaker and professor whose success has felt unearned to him. The secret he’s kept in his heart, like Gollum’s precious, is so subtle that it might be easily missed under the posturing and the Canadian patriotism. But that means “Oh, Canada” is all the more effective for being so layered.

Leo Fife (Richard Gere, who first worked with Mr Schrader on “American Gigolo” in 1980) lives in a colossal house with his third wife Emma (Uma Thurman). She was one of his students along with Malcolm (Michael Imperioli, who should be in way more movies as he’s always great) and Diana (Victoria Hill), a married Oscar-winning documentary duo who are making what is, or so they said, a reassessment of Leo’s career. But for Leo it is his last will and testament; he has a terminal cancer diagnosis and has therefore decided to unburden himself for posterity. He’s bottled up his thoughts for nearly a lifetime and this is his last chance to explain how the choices and mistakes he made as a young man (Jacob Elordi) have given him his current life. He’s really needy about Emma, which to her feels like the feeble ravings of an old fool. But for Leo, his insistence on Emma’s presence is so she can finally have the true measure of her husband, as he tells her – and the cameras – things he thinks she doesn’t know.

Young Leo is actually an American, who came of age in the late sixties, when plenty of young American men fled over the Canadian border to avoid being drafted into fighting in the Vietnam war. General discontent is in the air, so Leo impulsively robs the store in his hometown where his parents got him a job and decides to go check out Cuba. The woman who ends up being his first wife stops him in Florida, but their relationship doesn’t last long. He heads back north and meets Alicia (Kristine Froseth), the daughter of a wealthy Virginian family who loves and supports him. They settle down, have a small son and she’s pregnant again when her father offers him a chance to run the family business. In the days he has to think it over he’d already planned to visit a friend, Stanley (Jake Weary) in Vermont, where a college teaching job and an easy life are on offer. But then Leo makes a mistake.

All this is intercut with the 2023 logistics of filming Leo, during which he realises Malcolm is sleeping with the assistant Sloane (Penelope Mitchell), which he further realises Diana knows (but Sloane doesn’t know she knows). There’s also the needs of his body, his catheters and medicine, all ably managed by a nurse named Renee (Caroline Dhavernas). And fussing over all of it is Emma, a woman who sidelined her own filmmaking career to act as Leo’s producer and who thinks she knows all of Leo’s secrets. But Leo insists that she doesn’t, and actually says in front of her that everything in his life after he was 22 was a mistake. This is quite a thing to say out loud but it’s also something more men than anyone would like to admit believe is true. 

Mr Gere’s performance here is remarkable as it’s done with limited physicality, largely relying on tone of voice and our knowledge of his career to ensure the points lands. Mr Elordi, who is so tall he seems like he’s somehow bursting out of his own body, does equal work as someone fundamentally unhappy even as he is repeatedly handed the keys to the kingdom. There’s a lovely little scene when the already-married Leo and Stanley are hanging out at a party and a woman marches right up to Leo and introduces herself. Stanley makes a single, nearly invisible movement, which reminds Leo that 1) Stanley is single, and interested in her 2) while Leo might be interested in her, he’s married, and 3) it’s up to Leo to make the introduction, since she is talking to him. Leo immediately obliges, and the subtlety of that single gesture manages to contain an entire friendship and almost a worldview. 

The entire movie is just that good – just that subtle, just that knowing, just that exact in how it handles things. When Young Leo is in front of the draft board, his tactic to get himself exempted is to imply he’s a homosexual without overdoing it, which Mr Elordi achieves largely through tone of voice. When Mr Gere is trying to ignore the indignities of his body, he snaps at everyone, especially Emma, in tones they remind him they don’t appreciate. And because of all this subtlety, we have to wonder: was Leo’s big secret actually a secret all along, or has Emma always known? And if it was the big mistake that he’s spent half a century thinking it is, does that mean that his life – including his long marriage to Emma – is as worthless as he seems to think it is? It’s really unusual to see a whole movie about someone wondering whether or not their life was a mistake. It’s rarer still for that movie to leave the decision up to the viewer. This gives “Oh, Canada” a kick like a moose. 

Oh, and it’s a Christmas movie.