With the movie Oh, Canada, director Paul Schrader adapts Foregone, a novel by Russell Banks, who also wrote Affliction, which Schrader turned into another of his movies in 1997. Schrader's latest movies (First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener) have had a strange stillness, as if the director has moved beyond storytelling into a near meditative state.
Full of fraught memories and soul-wrenching torments, this meditative state isn't marked by calm or clarity. It's full of reckonings.
Richard Gere, who starred in Schrader's American Gigolo (1980), reunites with the director to play Leo Fife, an American-born documentary filmmaker who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War.
Riddled with cancer, the aging Fife has agreed to allow two of his former students (Michael Imperiole and Victoria Hill) to make a documentary about his life and work. Fife insists that the interview -- really an extended deathbed confession -- be conducted in the presence of his wife Emma (Uma Thurman).
Gere has been made to look gaunt and wasted. Cancer devours Leo's body, but lies and deceits eat away at his soul. He hopes to set the record straight. But Schrader has too much integrity to turn the story into a tale of last-minute redemption.
Schrader fragments the story so that we see Gere playing Fife at various stages of his life. For the most part, though, a younger Fife is played by Jacob Elordi. Gere and Elordi create an account of Fife's life that may be distorted by memory but nonetheless makes a mockery of the director's reputation as a filmmaker of courage and conviction.
An early episode illustrates the point. Fife, then married to his pregnant wife (Kristine Froseth), agrees to run the family business of his wealthy father-in-law, abandoning dreams of teaching and writing. He soon employs his modus operandi concerning women, he flees.
Because Fife makes films, it's tempting to look for spiritual kinship between Fife and Schrader, but such speculations can be dicey. Leo Fife built a reputation by being a good filmmaker, but he has no laurels on which to rest. The scaffolding that upholds his vaunted stature has been subject to rot. Exposing it doesn't make it a less bitter pill to swallow.
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