OH, CANADA (2024)

Nothing really comes into focus in Paul Schrader’s adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel Foregone. It has no dramatic centre, and being told largely from the perspective of a confused old man it doesn’t have the narrative clarity we expect—a mosaic vignette, like Mishima (1985). The real concern is, of course, whether this lack of cohesion served its purpose. Schrader’s 24th, Oh, Canada is gentler, less obsessive and violent than his ‘Man in A Room’ trilogy, but no less desperate. Graced with Matthew Houck’s (Phosphorescent) folk elegies, it’s a spotty, elegant work, compassionate yet unsentimental, laced with the contemplative shadings of existentialism. For all its faults, it’s not one of those prestige potboilers screaming from the bottom of the lungs for the Academy’s attention, but a rather painfully personal work that can feel like it’s torturing itself for its own good.

Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), an American-born Canadian political documentary filmmaker who was involved in the 1960s draft resistance, jumps all over the place in narrating his story, weaving an impossibly messy web of muddled timeline and contradictory details as a result of medication, cancer, and age. We see him through the eyes of Errol Morris’s interrotron, just as he sees on his teleprompter Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), one of his protégés from his teaching days, who’s also the director in charge of this CBC documentary project on the life and career of his mentor. Leonard’s tone is one of confessional revelation, and his third wife and ex-producer Emma (Uma Thurman), whom he insists on having within his direct line of sight, is to be his witness, with the camera as their bridge: he’s telling uncomfortable things she otherwise would refuse to hear and bear witness to, and it’s the only reason he agreed to be interviewed.

As Malcolm came with his agenda of becoming something of Leonard’s stature by thriving off championing him, and as Emma tried to put a stop to what she sees as opportunistic risking of a dying man’s health as well as the man’s own acts of vandalism towards his reputation, Leonard himself has something else entirely on his mind. Right from the jump, Leonard—the unbranded yearling he’d always been—takes over the whole thing from Malcolm’s hands: he ignores his questions and jumps right in with “the story begins on…”, setting the narrative as his own, to be told in his voice alone.

His torment isn’t as simple as a struggle to make peace with his guilty conscience by setting the record straight before he could go down in peace, but also something of an identity crisis—the existential kind. In his flashbacks, his appearance shifts between Gere’s and Jacob Elordi’s, who represents the young Leo. I guess I can see how Robert De Niro, who was also offered Gere’s part, would have resembled more closely with the polished white knight with thick eyebrows, deep gazing wide eyes, and a classical angular jawline, except for the fact that he’s not 6’5″, though that would not confound the general idea: Leonard as an “unreliable narrator” who, after lying through his teeth for so long, can no longer himself distinguish the falsehoods from the truths.

It’s a conceivable premise for a device—having Elordi as the manifestation of Leonard’s lies. But what is the point of having Leo talking with his young and pregnant second wife (Kristine Froseth) on the bed in Gere’s worn-out, wrinkled skin and harsh voice? Why wasn’t Leonard taken out of his imagination when he sees and hears himself (like we did)? Perhaps the film is too fixated on his confusion that it tries to represent that by becoming itself chaotic and random? Perhaps Leonard is too deep into his memories that he loses all self-awareness? Maybe Elordi was never Leo all along, but Leonard’s idealised vision of himself—Banks’ “hologram”. It would explain the height differential and contrast in handsomeness. But if poetry was the intent, then it only has succeeded at jarring us with doggerel. Not going as far as to suggest de-aging tech, but I think Gere’s appearance could have been used more subtly, like dubbing him with Elordi’s voice, or having his back face towards us to enhance the dreamlike subjectivity in those flashbacks.

Leonard’s recollections are all jumbled like soup, and some of us may grow as frustrated or fatigued as he is. He’s unfocused perhaps because he’s beginning to realize the inherent meaninglessness of the things that he once thought was his life, that the love of freedom in his youth and the destructive pursuit of dreams and desires may have ultimately been for nothing. We never find out for ourselves his own reasons for shaking off responsibilities on a whim, even when there’s good reason not to, maybe because the young Leo, his impulse and drive, is barely recognisable now for the old Leonard. At some point, while being let in on ostensibly grotesque secrets which even Emma may have been in the dark about, we discover along with him that we might have to take everything he recalls with a grain of salt. It’s a frightening thought: to realise that you never knew who you really were or what you did, that the person whom you once knew could feel so foreign that he becomes, against your best intention and effort, a fictionalised make-believe—“partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction.”

Russell Banks, who married four times and had four children, is the man behind everything you see in Oh, Canada. Foregone was his penultimate novel before passing away last year, and Oh, Canada was the original title he wanted (a Richard Ford novel Canada released in the same period forced him to search for another name to avoid confusion). It’s a book that’s in direct conversation with his autobiography Voyager: both Banks and Leonard had been inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to join the Revolution in Cuba and stopped short of leaving the shores of Florida, both were involved in radical politics against the Vietnam War, both were womanising losers who left behind their wives and children to pursue selfish interests, both had a rich history of petty crimes and mendacity, and both had gone on to become a renowned artist and public figure.

Both Banks and Leonard feel a discomfort with the public’s perception of them as important activists, with the former being involved with the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Civil Rights Movement in his early years, then having explored themes of globalisation and race in such works as The Book of Jamaica, Continental Drift, and The Darling, and with the latter coming into the limelight exposing the testing of Agent Orange for illegal use by the US government, before going on to document trials of sex offenders in the Church and the destruction of the environment. Both men hate the public personas that they built and willingly embraced for themselves.

Most of all, both were horny idiots who slept with wives of friends, hooked up with multiple women at a time without each other’s knowledge, travelled with a father-in-law’s money that was meant to go towards a house payment for their family to start a new life, and tacked on a thick, brazen face through all of it. The implied justification for such self-presentation was that that’s what they see when they use their arts and deconstructive techniques on themselves, as their own subjects, by peeling off the fabric and revealing the ugly stains underneath.

Intentionally or not, Banks was also epitomising something larger. In Dreaming Up America, “the mythology of starting over” was, “paradoxically,” what Banks points to as “the very essence of what it means to be American”: to escape from your past, evade for your crimes, abandon those who love you, and betray those who need you, and start anew. The process of this reinvention is perpetual: once the new becomes the old, the cycle starts over, and over again, until one runs out of steam. As Rob Latham wrote in his review of Foregone:

Even his impulse to cross the border and shed his old skin is quintessentially American, an urge to shrug off restrictions and light out for the territory that comes, as Fife and his teenage companion acknowledge on their abortive joyride, straight out of Huckleberry Finn and On the Road.

It’s not hard to see that Leonard’s whole project was hopeless from the get-go. To confront the uncomfortable truth, one must do away with all the conscious justifications and subconscious rationalisations for the wrongs. Closeted gays and lesbians go through hell trying to finally come out after decades of pretensions and repressions. Likewise, identity thieves go to war with themselves trying to revert to their original identity after years of living the lie, let alone intricate layers of lies. Leonard is in a similar predicament, except worse: he wasn’t stealing from anybody else but himself.

People are what’s left of the collision between what they had been and what they are now finding themselves in. As they move from one place, one social environment, one time, or one lover, to the next, they refashion themselves according to the ever-changing needs and desires. Trotskyists like James Burnham had a record of transforming into hardline neoconservatives, and bohemians from Dorothy Day to Bob Dylan reinvented themselves into religious pastors. I am not the same entity who started writing this sentence, and you are no longer the same person who began reading it. Just ask Hegel and he will prove it to you with nonsensical drivel about “negation” and “sublation”. You are what you do and think, and once the habit of lying about your past has gone on long enough, your past gradually slips away from you, as the mask cements down to become your new face.

Raised a Calvinist, Schrader is no stranger to the sort of confessional material that his Catholic peers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were also versatile in, but this one isn’t at all a success the way First Reformed (2017) or Taxi Driver (1976) was. Banks doesn’t dramatise the conflicts from Leonard’s betrayal of his friends and families—whether it’s from within or without—and neither does Schrader, so these sins which Leonard wishes to confess can feel weightless and less painful and heartfelt than they should. A longtime friend of Banks’, who adapted his book Affliction in 1997 to critical success, Schrader doesn’t so much transform his material as serve it the best he could. The film as a result is as unarranged as Leonard’s confessions. Some scenes have an emotional undertone, but they hit a dramatic dead end rather abruptly. Nothing gets cooked up, and nothing’s suspended or developed. In the beginning, while still coherent, it appears to be leading into a point, from which everything can be tied together. But as the man gets lost in the endless recounting of events, the point, that he was a loveless man who loved no one, gets lost in all the laboured remembering and shuffling. In the end, the movie takes too long to settle in place, as if it’s unwilling to let go of the man’s hand on his deathbed.

Rotten Tomatoes describes Richard Gere’s performance as “egoless”. It’s a strange thing to say of a performance, unless it’s meant to be applied to the character he plays. But that would be mistaking self-deprecation with humility. An actor who largely does not care very much for big roles, Gere has been staying in the indie landscape whenever and wherever he could for over a decade now, ever since his outspoken criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party’s repression alienated the Hollywood establishment. Before he would be impressed by Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and subsequently starring in his Days of Heaven (1978), he was a theatre kid who belittled cinema as an art form.

Now that 20 years had passed since Schrader cast him in American Gigolo (1980), which together with an Academy Award-winning performance in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) had elevated him into stardom, he was approached with an offer he could not refuse: to play the desiccated, “dying gigolo”. With slightly mousey eyes alchemized by his congenial dimples, Gere had received the script shortly before his father, who had been living with him, passed away. He knows that for dying men, time stops and becomes meaningless and alien (this was the first time he played “old”). But like most of the main cast, his presence was only intermittently convincing.

The movie suffers from having too many voices at once, without much leading in or fading out into each other, that you may easily lose yourself in the mess. Schrader doesn’t want to lose Banks’ lyricism, so he has Gere and Zach Shaffer as Leonard’s son narrate his words, and teams up with cinematographer Andrew Wonder in creating different tones for each narrative focus. There are the many threads Leo’s weaving with his account, with a bleached-out widescreen in the trip from Richmond to Canada; there are also his daydreams and reveries that he’s not translating into words, using American widescreen (1:85:1) in black-and-white flashbacks; and then there’s the reality before the camera where the politics on set are getting tense, to be conveyed in Gordon Willis’ dove-toned deep colour and academy aperture aspect ratio (1:33:1); and there’s also his long lost son Cornel whom he disavowed to his face, who recounts his effort at finding the long lost father he never met, with a reddish orange tone lifted from Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972). There are surprisingly little signs of nostalgia or glamorization in the period details (except the needle drops), in keeping with Fife’s, and by extension Banks’, unsentimental attitude. And there’s also a vaguely claustrophobic, dreamlike quality to the flashbacks: you can’t spot many dirt or grain, 

Realism of the cinema, like that of the graphic arts and literature, is false. It’s our senses that capture reality, and the cameras are there only to reproduce it. They can recount the reality of facts, and evoke the reality of feelings. But cameras cannot feel. We do. Leonard refuses to go on when the camera isn’t rolling, or when his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) is absent. The camera is a tool for people to confront the truth—not the truth coming out of the subject’s mouth, but their state of mind, their attitudes, and the feelings they wish to evoke—even though it cannot itself capture the truth. It’s like language: there’s always a gap, a possibility that meaning gets lost in the translation; but without telepathy, it’s the best we’ve got.

USA | 2024 | 91 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Paul Schrader.
writer: Paul Schrader (based on the novel ‘Foregone’ by Russell Banks).
starring: Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman, Victoria Hill, Michael Imperioli, Penelope Mitchell & Kristine Froseth.