Looking Back on a Fallen Life in “Oh, Canada”

The resurgence, in the past decade, of Paul Schrader as one of the most accomplished and acclaimed contemporary movie directors is part of a bigger trend: the self-reinvention of Hollywood auteurs as independent filmmakers. Since 2010, such directors as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Sofia Coppola have made their movies without studio financing, thereby often enjoying more creative freedom than previously. Schrader, who has been directing movies since 1978, has been an enthusiastic adopter of this production mode; his film “The Canyons” (2013) was crowdfunded on Kickstarter. His recent trio of independent movies—“First Reformed” (2017), “The Card Counter” (2021), and “Master Gardener” (2022)—offers scathing visions of corrupted American institutions through dramas of individuals whose repentance takes destructive forms. Constituting a kind of trilogy about expiation through violence—whether toward others or toward oneself—the films have a newfound starkness that reflects the severity of their subjects. Schrader’s latest, “Oh, Canada,” is his freest yet in terms of form, and, in its way, also presents his most extreme depiction of a fallen life. It is another drama of regret and confession, but Schrader’s approach is altogether new, making the movie seem less like the capstone of a tetralogy than like a radical revision of the themes and the styles of its three predecessors.

Schrader, who was raised in a strict Calvinist family, has built a career on the unfolding of religious themes in secular settings. Although “First Reformed,” about a minister in crisis, may be his most explicitly religious movie, “Oh, Canada” is, arguably, his most audacious religious vision. Adapted from Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” it is about an octogenarian documentary filmmaker based in Montreal named Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), who, terminally ill, sits for an extensive interview about his career—a kind of exit interview from life that becomes a confrontation with the self. Schrader’s casting of Gere in the role of Leonard (who goes by Leo) renders the film’s inherently retrospective premise deeply personal. Gere delivered the stylish and bristling lead performance in one of Schrader’s sleekest, most aestheticized films, “American Gigolo” (1980), and his presence in the new movie gives it an aura of a summing-up, as if the film embodied Schrader’s own career, his own past. “Oh, Canada” is a movie about the making of a movie, and this reflexive twist sparks Schrader’s flights of imaginative daring, along with his skeptical view of the business, with its vanities and compromises.

Leo made his name in 1970, with a film that revealed the testing of Agent Orange on Canadian farmland, and is celebrated for a body of issue-oriented investigative work. He’s being interviewed by two of his former film-school students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), who are partners in life and art, and Oscar winners, though Leo dislikes their output. Malcolm claims that, by making a documentary about Leo, he will be enshrining him as “an artiste engagé” and making him “as big in the Canadian collective memory as Glenn Gould,” but Leo has agreed to the interview in order to destroy his own reputation. He has a nonnegotiable proviso—that his wife and filmmaking partner, Emma (Uma Thurman), must remain in the room to see and hear the interview. He will confess things about his public and private life that he has never told her, with complete indifference to whatever use Malcolm and Diana may make of the material after he’s gone.

Leo isn’t Canadian; he was born in the United States and moved to Canada in his mid-twenties, in 1968, as a draft resister during the Vietnam War. Much of the movie dramatizes Leo’s recollections of his actions during the sixties, and Schrader tears into these flashbacks with palpable excitement, as if he’s been waiting for this rematch with the decade and with youth itself. The flashbacks cover the subjects of Leo’s confession, including his failed political commitment, two failed marriages and a failed romance, a failed cross-country trip inspired by “On the Road,” his failure to fulfill his youthful literary ambitions, his fateful effort to avoid military service, and his betrayal of a friend. There are also flashbacks that extend to more recent episodes, including reminiscences of his time as a film-school professor, in the nineties, with his then students Malcolm, Diana, and Emma. One of Leo’s failings is built into the architecture of the story—his abandonment of a son. The son’s voice (he’s played by Zach Shaffer) is heard at the very start of the film, looking back at Leo’s confessional interview (dated December 22, 2023) and death on that very day. This added frame—a retrospective view of retrospection—gives Leo’s narrative an encompassing sense of the irretrievable, of vanished opportunities for reconciliation.

The multiple layers of flashbacks are interwoven with scenes of the interview—of Leo’s fraught interactions with his three former students, and with his health aide, Rene (Caroline Dhavernas), and the interviewers’ assistant, Sloane (Penelope Mitchell). Schrader keeps things straight for viewers through the use of shrewd visual cues. The interview and the goings-on around it take place in the Fifes’ Montreal town house and are filmed with a nearly square frame and a broodingly dark dun-and-amber color scheme. Many of the other flashbacks are in black-and-white, portrayed as abstract and distant.

In contrast, for the center of the film—the crucial year 1968—Schrader uses a wide-screen frame and an alluring peach-and-mint palette that evokes classic Hollywood melodramas. The resulting vividness shows that this is, essentially, the eternal present of Leo’s entire life, the defining moment that he self-punishingly revisits in greatest detail for the documentary. In March of that year, Leo (played as a young man by Jacob Elordi) is teaching at the University of Virginia and married to Alicia (Kristine Froseth). Their son is a toddler, Alicia is pregnant again, and they’re planning a move to Vermont, where Leo has been hired by Goddard College. Before that, they’re visiting her wealthy parents in Richmond. The day before Leo is to travel to Vermont to buy a house—with money from Alicia’s trust fund—her father (Peter Hans Benson) and her uncle (Scott Jaeck) offer him the chance to take over the family’s pharmaceutical business as a sinecure that they liken to Wallace Stevens’s insurance work and T. S. Eliot’s bank job. For Leo, this is an offer he can’t not refuse: it would pin him to his wife’s family and their “genteel, Southern white politics” and separate him from his friends in the Goddard bohemian circle.

In these scenes, Schrader films with a visual romanticism and a loving attachment to the era’s physical stylings: the sleek lines of Leo’s mid-sixties Corvair, the swooping modernism of a new airport, the gleam of a diner counter, the confident solidity of the refrigerators and telephones. The principal flashback is a road movie in itself—Leo’s travels from Virginia to Washington, D.C., then to his home town, near Boston, and on to Vermont, and, finally (it’s no spoiler), to Canada. The surface-cooled, internally raging melodrama of this brisk journey is fuelled by Leo’s self-loathing account of the lies—overt deceptions and crafty silences—on which his life has ever since been based.

The distinction of Schrader’s latter-day method and manner becomes clear if one considers his previous adaptation of a novel by Banks, “Affliction” (1997). That film, which tells a bitter story of a killing and a coverup and features an emotionally scarred protagonist, seems impersonal and externalized—as if soaked in Hollywood’s industrial varnish. Schrader’s recent work—shot rapidly, on low budgets—displays rough textures that run through the performances, the editing, the dialogue, and the sense of form.

In “Oh, Canada,” Schrader realizes a tale of immense complexity with bold ease. He is helped by the sharp-eyed editing of Benjamin Rodriguez, Jr., and the variety of Andrew Wonder’s cinematography. Schrader’s script, meanwhile, is full of conceptual leaps, and he daringly assigns some actors to play multiple roles. At the center of things is the dual characterization of Leo: Elordi plays young Leo with an appealingly diffident gruffness that gently abrades the surfaces of his cultivated politeness; Gere projects a dying man worn down and roughed up by physical and moral suffering to the point where he has no surfaces and no politesse left. (In another twist, Gere sometimes takes Elordi’s place as Leo’s younger self.) Later, there is an extraordinary turn that both wrenches Leo’s confession away from practical, on-camera delivery and raises it to sublime spiritual heights—to a subjectivity akin to a God’s-eye and God’s-ear perspective. Schrader frames Leo’s crossing of the border as the end point of his life, as the real death, the one he’d traded his soul for more than fifty years earlier. The story of Leo’s entire public life, of his acclaimed cinema and teaching career, of his romantic and professional partnership with Emma, is the story of a life lived posthumously. Its religious vision is also a horror; “Oh, Canada” is, in effect, a zombie movie. ♦