‘Oh, Canada’ review: Paul Schrader’s latest is his most personal work

A story that unfolds on death’s doorstep, Oh, Canada is a thoughtful, reflective work from Paul Schrader, if an occasionally rushed one. Whether or not its hurried approach is a defect — it most certainly plays like one, as though there was only so much time to wrap it up before the reaper comes a-calling — it also results in a more intimate embodiment of everything on Schrader’s mind when it was made.

The tale of a documentary filmmaker on his deathbed who becomes the camera’s subject, the film is based on the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks. (Schrader previously adapted Banks’ novel Affliction in 1997.) The author would sadly pass away in January 2023, a few months before filming began, and shortly after Schrader himself had a brush with death thanks to COVID-19.

This proximity to grief, and to the grave, informs Oh Canada‘s storytelling, which plays like a recollection of regrets. Its structure and narrative POV shift in beguiling ways, as though the movie’s main character — played by two actors at different ages — was rushing to absolve himself of sin. Along the way, he confuses and collapses his many confessions into a single, muddled mythology that constantly shifts through elliptical editing, as if to reflect the character’s disoriented state of mind. The details may be unreliable, but his story pulses with riveting emotional truths, born from lifelong remorse. 

What is Oh, Canada about?   

Now confined to hospice care, Canadian filmmaker Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) agrees to an interview conducted by his former film students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), during his final weeks of life. Cancer has ravaged his body, and his treatment has left him tired, but as an artist who has always used his camera to unearth people’s truths, he hopes Malcolm and Diana’s lens will do the same for him, and help him unburden himself as his wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), looks on.

Many details of Leonard’s life are publicly known, especially his conscientious Vietnam draft-dodging, after which he left the U.S. for the Great White North as a political asylee. However, just as much of his story remains shrouded in mystery, which he now unpacks as last rite. In flashbacks set in the ’60s and ’70s, Leonard is played by Jacob Elordi (of Priscilla fame), though on occasion, Gere himself strides through scenes where Elordi ought to be, a swap that occurs either through straightforward cuts, or the occasional Texas Switch.

The seamlessness with which the older Leonard replaces his younger self has an eerie effect, as though something in the fabric of his story were deeply amiss. As he reveals some particularly shameful and macabre family secrets, Emma remains in denial over his revelations and insists that Leonard must be confused about the details. He is, in a way, given the overlap between events and characters he recalls, but all of these revelations come from a place of deep pain and repression. Whether or not they’re logistically true, Gere makes their emotional truth feel undeniable via a towering, career-defining performance as a man both afraid and determined to stare at the camera and be seen by it, as he struggles to purge himself of demons that have long been eating at his soul.

Paul Schrader brings a thoughtful filmmaking eye to Oh, Canada.

Credit: Cannes Film Festival

Throughout Oh, Canada, Leonard’s regret is enhanced by Schrader’s interrogative filmmaking, which draws from numerous documentarian techniques. The film for which he provides his personal testimony — about his own life, and his work as anti-war activist after his illegal border-crossing — takes the form of a traditional interview talking head, albeit with an aesthetic twist that yields several haunting close-ups.

In order to pay tribute to Leonard, his students film him with the use of a camera set-up he invented. In reality, this is the Interrotron developed by The Thin Blue Line director Errol Morris; it’s a teleprompter that allows the subject to meet the interviewer’s eye (or rather, a reflection of it) while staring directly down the camera’s lens. By attributing the tool to the fictitious Leonard, Schrader creates a double-edged sword. The technique has long afforded Leonard the comfort of sitting behind a video monitor, rather than meeting his subjects’ gaze directly. But now, as the subject of his own camera, his confession occurs in a darkened, lonely room.