‘Oh, Canada’ Review: A Life Retrospective That Amounts to Little

Paul Schrader’s newest film Oh, Canada is powerful yet confusing. With a narrative that forces its main trio of actors in Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, and Jacob Elordi to chase lofty thematic ideas, the film starts strong but unfortunately loses its footing quickly, unable to strike a deal between tone, storyline, and what is trying to be said.

‘Oh, Canada’ Depicts a Life Of Regret

Professor Leonard Fife (Gere) is enduring his final days thanks to a bout of cancer. With his wife Emma (Thurman) at his side, he agrees to take part in a documentary chronicling his illustrious career as a famous Canadian-based documentarian. However, he quickly forgets why he agreed to participate in such an exercise being helmed by two of his former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Rene (Caroline Dhavernas). Treating it as a confessional, Fife goes on to recall some of the pivotal moments of his youth, with the film using flashbacks to convey his meaningful tales.

During the flashback scenes, a young Fife (Elordi) is seen as a youthful 20-year-old: unsure of himself and his emotions and constantly changing physical locations to avoid the impounding pressures of his family, friends, and Uncle Sam wanting him for the war. Elordi is, as always, a surefire screen presence but delivers an energy akin to a stand-in role, never really giving much and never really getting much to work with. As the senior Fife continues his recollections that navigate expeditiously towards confusing mixups of what once was and perhaps what he maybe wanted to be a reality, the film crumbles under the weight of such pertinent themes displayed in the first act.

‘Oh, Canada’ Starts Strong but Can’t Maintain Its Momentum

Gere delivers a solid performance, physically bringing forth the vulnerability that a dead-end sickness exacerbates. The use of voice-over to smoothly transition from a present-day display of him in front of the camera (shot in a gorgeous 4:3 aspect ratio) to memories past (shot in both color and black-and-white widescreen) is a smart touch from auteur Paul Schrader. Schrader elicits a sense of troubled nostalgia with not only a script that almost confrontationally delivers the core ideas of the film but also his style of shooting.

With a movie that revolves around a man at his end of days, naturally moving and talking slowly, and a cinematography tone to reflect that, it’s perplexing why the film ultimately feels rushed in its deliverance of such themes. At a mere 91 minutes long, it feels as though the film would have been serviced much better by a two-and-a-half-hour runtime, allowing the potent ideas to simmer and stew instead of taking them so abruptly off the burner.

There’s no question that the film resonates. Schrader is uncompromising in his traversal of regretful youth. “I can’t tell the truth unless there’s a camera on,” as senior Fife states, feels markedly similar to the narratives surrounding many late-stage auteurs and their art. The soul-draining regret of something like not knowing how to love at such a young age all while jumping from bed to bed and lover to lover is impressively navigated but disappears into the confounding back half of the film that strays away from what makes the first half so strong. Eventually, as Fife tires from his near-spiritual exercise of attempting to understand the importance of his own story, the movie introduces tonally juxtaposing storylines like the camera crew of the documentary implanting a secret camera into his room as he takes his last breath.

Schrader’s Oh, Canada pops like a balloon drifting beautifully in the wind that runs into a slicing blade of grass. The ideas are there and the beautiful cinematography is alluring through the entirety of the film along with a great soundtrack. The movie fails to overtake its potential, though, never amounting to more than a troubling recollection of what makes us who we are. Just as old age induces sporadic confusion, so does Oh, Canada — a point that doesn’t work in a movie that ultimately doesn’t work either.

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