This review was first made public on May 18, 2024, out of the Cannes Film Festival. We are pushing it now to go in tandem with Oh, Canada’s release in theaters.
Then, how should we interpret a picture that serves to instantaneously defeat such a concept? Or to take it further, why do young people see Paul Schrader’s meme of a lone man journaling in a bare room so often? This is meant to underscore the fact that Paul Schrader has been tackling the strange phenomenon of the absentee man in America for a long time now – most recently with the rather dismal erection of a struggling character in ‘The Card Counter’ and its two theorized sequels. To put it more bluntly – his fans and audiences, especially young ones, do not buy it. His films encompass the young audience who have lived in an epoch marked by both unremitting severance and a whole ‘lotta faucets.
Why does this matter? It explains the arc of a self-proclaimed priest turned director, Paul Schwader, whose films can be regarded as a trilogy and include First Reformed (2017), Master Gardener (2022), and The Card Counter (2021). Why is there this obsession with loneliness?
So, in conclusion, the spin-off Oh, Canada, which is based on Russell Banks’s novel Foregone and Schrader’s outlook on a dying man, comes out strongly. As Richard Geere himself says, “When you have no future, all you have is the past,”. Fife is grasping onto the past because he has lived most of his life as a man celebrated – “When the audience is out, you are out too. If there is no documentary, there is no Fife, that is the thought that runs through his mind.” It does offer interesting content, in terms of our last peek into a notable individual’s life that does not feel very good indeed. It is interesting to know that Fife wanted to tell everything he wanted, and he even brought his wife, who is played by Uma Thurman, “I want it to look like a confession, so it will be an entirely different experience.”
Fife as we are aware has achieved fame in Canada for his political films after he fled America to escape the Vietnam War draft in his early 20s. The structure of the film recalls Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, which is a major influence for Schrader, as it consists of a young documentary filmmaker’s dying thoughts and postmodern episodes from his life. The present is constantly jolted by flashbacks and memories sprout flashes of other memories. The lower that his character goes back, other actors such as Jacob Elordi, clipped the young Fife’s perfect teasing gone too far. Since the climatic crux of Fife’s memory is fractured between several timeframes, Gere himself occasionally assumes the role of Fife. And once again Thurman does flash as being one more lady from Fife’s childhood like So, Fanda in Bertoluccio’s film improved notions through a multitude of parts in his movie. Fife, who is also a relic in China with The Conformist portraying a god-like portrayal of himself first met Geri. Elordi, tall and thin has the indefinite draught of a meek child with a twisted spineless command of his life’s climactic direction.
Although the interviewers are particularly interested in Fife’s achievements in his career, Fife would rather shift the focus to his personal experiences, such as a difficult wife and baby son whom he left back in Virginia, and other emotional milestones during the journey. Steadfastness and tremendous love for his ideas and principles have built him as a man of war but the haunting past comprising wreckage cannot be disregarded. He also repeatedly suggests disturbing details which he claims Emma is unaware of and the film leaves some of these mysteries for pretty long. At the time that the expected ‘secrets’ are revealed, the viewer may feel strange and sometimes even disappointed that it did not seem as if it was worth the wait and build-up. The movie after all is not so much about the one single event of betrayal or lying, it is rather about failure and rottenness that all of us undergo in our lives or the facts that we avoid showing to the world focusing on practicality, kindness, or fear.
It’s not difficult to understand why it is said that Schrader is likely to have been attracted to this material. Besides the intimations of mortality that naturally come with aging the director had a health scare a few years back, which he spoke about candidly at the time. One of the characters in the film, James R. Banks, is Mr. Schrader’s friend, and Mr. Schrader had based one of his most loved films of 1997, ‘Affliction’ on the novel which James R. Banks wrote, died in early 2023. All these in all probably contributed to the idea of an Affliction prequel featuring a dying filmmaker preparing a video testimonial. But while Oh, Canada depends on an unremittingly bleak story, narratively it is quite buoyant, even light-headed. The frequent changing of the timelines in the film allows the audience to experience momentum throughout the entire picture of 91 minutes, and country-folk singer Matthew Houck (Phosphorescent) gives Fife’s wandering a lyrical tinge as his songs are featured in the film. (The effect is quite reminiscent of the Michael Been songs that the director made such generous use of in 1992’s strange crime drama Light Sleeper, perhaps his best movie ever.) Oh, Canada bears the hallmark of a film that was birthed out of anguish but it has an interesting plot that is filled with hope. Whether Canada is that hope or rather what is referred to as the undiscovered country, is another question.
In any case, it is as if a great burden has been removed from both the person who studies it and the one who creates it.
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