Oh, Canada

Paul Schrader’s most recent movie “Master Gardener” was the conclusion to an unofficial trilogy. And if it was the least successful of the three, it still felt revealing, almost entirely eschewing the tedious work of narrative stitching, pruned down to almost nothing but gesture and symbol, as if in his late 70s and in the last couple years in rough health, he didn’t feel he had time left on this earth for anything else but getting straight to the heart of the matter. It makes sense, then, that he would be drawn to adapting the late Russell Banks’s 2021 novel “Foregone” in which aging Canadian documentary filmmaker Leo Fife (Richard Gere) sits for an interview meant to honor and summarize his work only to instead turn the tables on the director, his former student Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), by turning it into something else. Leo, it is explained, popularized a documentary technique in which the subject being interviewed can look directly into the camera while also seeing the interviewer in a monitor above the lens, and so, he insists that his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), sit in the interviewer’s chair rather than Malcolm. Schrader’s mode of confession has always been the diary, alienated men sitting at tables writing in them, but in “Oh, Canada” it becomes the camera and Emma becomes the confessor. 

Dying of cancer, leaving him little time to waste, Leo has little interest in a career retrospective, yearning instead to set the record (his life) straight. And so, each time Malcolm ostensibly cues him up to discuss his career on camera, Leo ignores the question to recount his unmentioned past instead, going back to the beginning in America, when he was married in Virginia with a baby on the way and an opportunity to take over his genteel in-laws’ family business only to abandon them, in a bleak bit of irony using the Vietnam Draft as his excuse to flee his own existence by way of fleeing the country and setting up his second act as a Canadian hero fraud. (Jacob Elordi plays the younger version of Leo.) Schrader does not present the story in a linear fashion, but in a jumble resembling memory, or a faulty memory, flashing back to different eras and places but not in any exact order and recounting these different eras and places in different colors and aspect ratios (different actors also play different characters in different eras). In one bravura shot, we see the older Leo as Gere looking in through the window at the younger Leo as Elordi, virtually bringing the idea of the dream self as the current self and calling into question the veracity of his recollections as much as Emma does, none of which Schrader chooses to clarify.  

Leo being played by Gere is an incisive bit of through the looking glass casting hearkening back 44 years to the actor starring in Schrader’s “American Gigolo”; hearing Gere, of all actors, as Leo wearily lament in voiceover whether a young woman can smell his stale feces renders it doubly profound. Gere keeps Leo preeminently grumpy, never unburdened by what he perceives as the truth, almost more constrained by it. And that echoes nicely off Elordi, a sly turn in which he truly embodies the slippery sense of a poseur. Indeed, the ironically triumphant conclusion leaves redemption twisting in the wind.