Oh, Canada: Richard Gere’s reunion with his American Gigolo director is a dismal, sexless snooze
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Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada tells a story that isn’t remotely worth telling, being the memoirs of an unreliable narrator who could bore for the entire Commonwealth. The culprit is Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a renowned documentary-maker who’s close to death, and spends most of the film talking on camera for what’s meant to be his final interview.
His endlessly patient wife Emma (Uma Thurman) is in the room while this is being shot, and finds herself thrown by where Leonard’s reminiscences lead: they’re often jumbled and/or self-contradictory, and it’s hard to guess their accuracy. He may be confused about what secrets he’s smothered through adulthood. What’s mainly at issue is not his career, which gets covered in a showreel-style montage midway through, but his romantic past.
Schrader has turned for the second time to the work of Russell Banks (Affliction), adapting the late American writer’s penultimate novel, Foregone. As in the book, we go back to the time of the Vietnam War draft in 1969, to see Leonard played by the half-foot-taller Jacob Elordi. He’s revealed as a slippery fellow: ghosting on partners, having children he’ll disavow, fleeing to Canada to dodge conscription. His defining characteristic is being this hollow man, but the actors struggle to make him interesting in any way.
Banks made it clear that this big interview was all at Leonard’s instigation, a last-ditch attempt to set the record straight. Schrader’s script fluffs those nuances. Doing that tetchy impatience he uses so often as a crutch, Gere is 44 years away from the beautiful shell he played for Schrader in American Gigolo (their last collaboration together), but this isn’t poignant: he just seems monotonously annoyed at being dislodged from his deathbed. To get into Leonard’s loafers, Elordi’s only choice is to break his run of form after Saltburn and Priscilla by acting like a mannequin.
When Thurman pops up with a headband in another role altogether, we’re meant to wonder anew what tricks her husband’s ailing mind is playing on him. We’ve trodden this path in The Father already, but Oh, Canada’s twists are far more desultory and vague. Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.
It’s also spiked by accidental camp, with a ludicrous homage to Citizen Kane at the end. But the silliest moment has to be Schrader’s choice to cut back to Gere after one flashback, to find he has literally fallen asleep. As an autobiographer, Leonard might seem like his own harshest critic in doing so – but competition for that post in the fatiguing glare of Cannes will be stiff.
Screening at Cannes Film Festival; UK
