Paul Schrader and Russell Banks. Remember Affliction? It won James Coburn an Academy Award.
Paul Schrader and Richard Gere. Remember American Gigolo. It kick started his career.
So what went wrong with OH, CANADA? Oh, Dear, not a foregone conclusion.
Russell Banks had researched and written a book about dying when he was healthy titled, Foregone. He’d wanted to call it Oh, Canada (there was a conflict with Richard Ford’s Canada), and asked Schrader if he would use his original title. So Foregone became Oh, Canada.
In the film, Richard Gere plays an ailing documentary film maker, Leonard Fife, who agrees to be interviewed on camera before he shuffles off his mortal coil.
At Leonard’s insistence, his wife and indispensable producing partner, Emma (Uma Thurman), hears it all. Leonard’s successes are held up against his failings – the fibs held up against the facts – cleansed of the myth, sort of, a confessional that is still mired in managed memory. Sick and dying in Montreal, Leo is determined to set the record staright. “I made a career out of getting people to tell me the truth,” he says, “Now it’s my turn.”
As the director of lauded documentary exposés, he has much to be proud of, but his avoidance of the Vietnam War draft and his past relationships harbour thorny truths. In flashback, Schrader dramatises candid stories about Leo’s younger self, played by Jacob Elordi.
Meditatively, OH, CANADA is a movie about the marcescence of memory and although it has some memorable scenes and images and a commanding performance by Gere, the film becomes moribund, a death bed vigil.
OH, CANADA touches on important topics like dying with dignity, the invasion of privacy, and the manipulation of truth, yet never quite fulfils the promise of its premise.
