‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi and Uma Thurman in Paul Schrader’s Feeble Mortality Investigation

Paul Schrader’s 1999 adaptation of novelist Russell Banks Affliction, led by scorching performances from Nick Nolte and James Coburn, was a disturbing and dark coming together of two writers who share a fascination with conflicting morality and complicated relationships taken to the dark extreme. But Schrader’s return to the late author’s work, this time the 2021 novel Renounced, yields fewer rewards. For a film about big themes like mortality, memory, truth and redemption, Oh, Canada feels both light and stubbornly bound to the pages, too unsatisfactorily fleshed out to give its actors any meat to chew on.

Published two years before Banks’ death in early 2023, the book is an intimate portrait of a man contemplating his legacy as he nears the end of his life. It’s easy to understand what drew Schrader to this story, given his own pandemic fears and his wife, actress Mary Beth Hurt’s, diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease. But while the bones are there for an in-depth, highly personal character study in which a famous artist sets out to debunk the myths surrounding his life, any deep connection between the director and the material is elusive.

It’s hard to get excited about Richard Gere’s central performance as Leonard Fife, a documentary filmmaker famous for his exposes on topics like Agent Orange, clergy sexual abuse, and illegal seal hunting. . Rising from his deathbed in Montreal, in the final stages of terminal cancer, Leonard agrees to be filmed in an interview conducted by the couple he sardonically describes as “Mr. and Mrs. Ken Burns from Canada.”

These would be Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and René (Caroline Dhavernas), both students of Leonard, as is his much younger wife, Emma (Uma Thurman). Increasingly irascible and quickly fading, Leonard insists that Emma be present throughout, as if confessing to her the lies and failures of his life is the most important part of the exercise.

The wife doesn’t really have a role to play, and Thurman can give her nothing more than a sustained note of quivering concern, aside from the occasional moment of anger or impatience when Emma senses that her husband is pushed beyond the limits of his fragile health. .

Gere gives one of those performances often praised for their lack of conceit, and certainly, in scenes near the end of Leonard’s life, he looks like he’s traveled a million miles on bad roads since her peak of beauty in Schrader. American gigolo.

With a sparse head of white hair, a face half covered in stubble, and blotchy skin that shows the ravages of the disease plaguing the character, Leonard is clearly suffering. But Gere is only playing with his nervousness; he’s a collection of tics, twitches, and grimaces rather than a fully inhabited character that we’re forced to care about.

While Leonard is obviously intended to be a complex character with an abrasive side, neither the man nor the supposed revelations he draws from the past offer much in the way of enlightenment or catharsis. It doesn’t help that it’s often stuck with trite dialogue or overly mature voiceovers (“She smells desire itself.”)

As Leonard reflects on memories that may or may not be entirely true, the film shifts somewhat randomly between color and black and white, and changes proportions from the tightly framed “Interrotron” shot of Malcolm to a vision broader of the past. (Andrew Wonder was the cinematographer.) These late ’60s and ’70s interludes are nicely enhanced by delicate indie folk songs written and performed by Matthew Houck, who records under the name Phosphorescent.

Leonard is played as a younger man by Jacob Elordi, who gives the most lived-in performance in the film (never mind that he’s more than half a foot taller than Gere). But just to confuse things, young Leonard is also played by Gere without the aging makeup. They sometimes appear simultaneously, such as when the middle-aged version looks through a window at her younger self, sharing an afternoon of pleasure in bed with Amanda (Megan MacKenzie), one of a series of wives and girlfriends among whom he apparently drifts. without ever loving any of them until Emma.

The tricks of memory are also suggested by the double casting of Thurman as the depressed wife of a Vermont painter friend, with whom Leonard has desultory sex after receiving bad news about the family he left behind in Virginia.

How much of her past Emma knows is ambiguous; often she tries to stop the interview, insisting that her husband is making things up that didn’t happen, that his mind can no longer distinguish truth from fiction.

Schrader weaves together fragments of Leonard’s life non-chronologically, including an argument with his parents at age 18 when he informed them that he was abandoning his studies to go to Cuba. We witness a pivotal moment when he and his wife Alicia (Kristine Froseth), pregnant with their second child, prepare to move to Vermont, where he takes a teaching job. A very insistent offer from his wealthy father (Peter Hans Benson) to take over the family pharmaceutical business threatens to thwart this plan. There’s also a former wife, Amy (Penelope Mitchell), married off in what, in hindsight, seems like a moment of youthful impulsiveness.

The reason Leonard remains so determined to continue with the interview even though he’s clearly not up to it is because he considers himself an imposter — a belief that stems largely from his status as a left-wing hero, admired for his opposition to conscription. The circumstances that led him to flee to Canada prove less straightforward, and the emotional chaos he left behind returns 30 years later when his estranged son (Sean Mahan) shows up at a documentary screening.

All this remains curiously inert and little involved in Oh, Canada, which at 95 minutes seems too rushed to add much drama to Leonard’s purge or much pathos to Emma’s discovery of his secrets. Schrader adds a typically piquant touch of deception (with shades of his 2002 feature, Autofocus) via Malcolm’s unethical actions once Emma gets what she wants and interrupts the interview. But even that is not enough to give the story any real consequence.

What a shame that a writer-director of Schrader’s stature returns to the Cannes competition for the first time since 1988 with such a minor entry in his estimable filmography.