Directed By Paul Schrader
Starring – Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi
The Plot – Leonard Fife (Gere), one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, shares all his secrets to de-mythologize his mythologized life, while on the edge of death with irreversible cancer.
This film is currently not rated
POSITIVES
You never quite know what you’re going to get with a Paul Schrader film, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be contemptuously reminiscent of his own personal themes and critiques on an industry that he has made a prestigious career out of. While ‘Oh, Canada’ is far from my favorite of his written or directed films, the captivity of a story being constructed from the perspective of an unreliable narrator comes with many fascinating challenges, with the most compelling of them stemming from the techniques of the presentation, which authentically feel lifted from a man struggling to put the pieces together from his past. The editing is intentionally all over the place, with abrupt cuts and overlapping dialogue coming at a consistency to the integrity of the picture, while the bizarreness of the ever-shifting aspect ratios seem to convey memorability during particular timelines in ways that makes it easier to convey just where we’re at during one of the many dramatic shifts that Leonard makes in his challenges with linear storytelling. This film has three of them, with the present day being filmed in academy ratio, the past being filmed in 2.35:1, and his personal memories from college filmed with black and white photography inside of widescreen footage, whose width feels like an intentional choice of its own to sprout the hope and endless possibilities that stem from such a youthful age. For so many shifts along the consistency of the presentation, the clarity of the intention felt quite effortless, and while my issues with the storytelling feel never-ending, there was a psychological mystique about the presentation that actually did keep me glued throughout the narrative, even with a protagonist who crosses into detestable territory with the same lack of reservations that he does when he crosses into Canada. Speaking of our protagonist, the lack of morality is no issue, as both Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi tap into a fearless duo of performances in emulating the young and older sides of Leonard, with attention to detail in the small nuances of each that make it all the more seamlessly convincing that they are the same character. Gere’s familiar eye twitches do in fact become a staple of Elordi’s portrayal, but it’s more of the pretentiousness that binds their respective outings, and with spontaneity in the usage of each of them during differing moments in the exploration of Leonard’s memories, for reasons I’m guessing speaks to shallowness of Leonard’s character continuously seeing himself as a young threat to good looking women everywhere, there’s plenty of opportunities for each of them to shine in the confines of the character, with Gere’s crotchety contempt for being matched by Elordi’s confliction, for a character with his own fears for conquering responsibility. Beyond Gere and Elordi, Uma Thurman also proves her worth in a dual role that conjures her nurturing sensibilities as a supportive spouse, despite the younger side of her character’s duality unfortunately saddling her with one of the worst wigs that I have seen in a film this year. Lastly, Schrader still knows how to conjure compelling dialogue in ways that takes the beats of his slow-burn consistency miles, particularly those of Gere interacting with his peers in his home while being interviewed for the documentary. If crafted superbly, dialogue and body language can tell us everything about the feelings of the characters without deliberately coming out and saying it, and those during these sporadic sections throughout the engagement spawned trepidation and discomfort naturally as a means to driving the kind of measured tension that Schrader has perfected, with a volcanic eruption that could materialize at any moment, as a result of Leonard’s discomfort with the production of the documentary. Whether it does or doesn’t eventually come, Schrader knows how to zero in on the vulnerabilities that drive his characters’ sensitivities, making it considerably easier to deal with some of the film’s grandest faults, to which there are no shortage of.
NEGATIVES
Articulating a reflective narrative from the framing device of a lifetime liar turned senile seemed like a creative idea, but the execution grows tediously frustrating the longer the exploration persists, feeling the rushed and underdeveloped realities of a 17 day shooting schedule and 86-minute run time that compresses this script in the worst kind of ways. Between scenes abruptly ending without resolution and a buffet of underdeveloped characters, it unabashedly feels like Schrader has no reservations about sacrificing the accessibility of his audience, and as a result the movie attains no semblance of momentum throughout such a repetitiously unappealing engagement, which I crazily think would less compromising with more time to flesh out not only a deeper sense of purpose for some of the supporting characters, but also some kind of credible reward for the distance of the journey, which ends without the proper exclamation point that Schrader typically saves his fireworks for. Schrader’s direction is another issue that I had with the film, as he tragically underplays the film’s biggest moments with mundanity so bland that it feels like this film is completely void of anything even remotely resembling a climax. The loudest of these is certainly during the film’s closing moments, where Gere’s last grasp of effective communication overwhelms him with the many fictional paths that he has created for himself, and between the confusing framing of the ending reaching for an emotional triumph that didn’t come close to moving me, and so many unanswered questions in the arc of the documentary within the movie, Schrader turns in what is easily to me his single weakest direction in the entirety of his career, which is all the more disappointing coming off of the career resurgence that was ‘First Reformed’ and ‘Master Gardener’. Talking about the creative clumsiness wouldn’t be complete without discussing the weak characters that make up its entirety, with the worst of these easily being Leonard, who is every bit pretentious as he is selfishly uncaring about who and what he hurts in so many irresponsible decisions. Whether or not you take anything that Leonard says with a grain of salt, his emotional outbursts become all the more annoying and incoherent with anyone’s refusal to cater to him, and though this could be artistically intentional on the part of Schrader conveying that the incoherence of the past comes back to haunt the coherence of the current, it doesn’t make Leonard any easier to tolerate for the long-term, without any attained increment of empathy or appreciation for the adversity that confines him in his current vegetative state. Finally, while I surprisingly felt unharmed from a majority of the movie’s dialogue, the overhead narration involving dual characters became an erratic annoyance, made all the more confusing by a first act angle that it drops almost immediately. Instead of this film being narrated entirely from Leonard’s perspective, it opens with his son Cornel discussing his lack of relationship with his father. If this served a long-form purpose relevant to even a majority of the proceeding scenes, then it would’ve made sense to give him this initial focus, but the script quickly strays from this framing device by passing it onto Leonard, and with only one following scene involving Cornel to justify its cause, it feels like an aspect from the original version of the script that somehow carried over to the second draft, with flatly dull and meandering reads from Zach Shaffer that I wish were omitted from the finished product entirely.
OVERALL
‘Oh, Canada’ is a rare mishap from Schrader, who in adapting someone else’s material loses much of the entertainment value and emotional heft in translation, to make this one of the most dull and unrewarding engagements of Oscar season. Despite unflinching performances from Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi, the mumblings of a weathered old man surprisingly don’t make for the most coherently sound storytelling, deporting this semi-autobiographical project for Schrader to the coldly chilling surroundings away from public eyes, where it rightfully belongs.
My Grade: 5/10 or D