More than forty years ago, screenwriter-director Paul Schrader and star Richard Gere took the screen by storm with "American Gigolo." This seductive thriller, set against a backdrop of Armani fashion and Giorgio Moroder's synth-pop, captured the sleek surface and spiritual indulgence of the 1980s.
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03-29, 2025Their reunion looks distinctly different, but it does grapple with a very familiar brand of survivalist masculinity—with heartthrob Jacob Elordi on hand to provide the requisite smolder. In the new film "Oh, Canada," Gere plays Leonard Fife, a renowned Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, now stricken with cancer, who agrees to a final interview about his life, the camera finally turned fully on himself.
Confined to his Montreal home, wheelchair-bound, and with mottled skin and thinning hair, Leonard is a far cry from the hired hustler he once played. That man was so suave he even used his own Blondie theme song to seduce women, prowling through the night. Nevertheless, Leonard's wit hasn't dulled, and he's quick to fire back at the Oscar-winning couple—whom he calls "the Canadian version of Ken Burns"—trying to adapt his life for the screen.
"Your career is emblematic of political filmmaking," the director (Michael Imperioli), who idolizes him, is eager to preach at the feet of his hero. But Leonard is more concerned with confronting his personal demons, with, as he puts it, "offering testimony." With Leonard’s former student and wife of 30 years, Emma (Uma Thurman), effectively serving as his confessor, Leonard’s interview becomes an act of contrition. "There are things I’ve never even said to myself," he says.
In flashbacks to the late 1960s, a twenty-something Leonard (Elordi) flees his marriage and scheming in-laws in Richmond, Virginia, and evades the Vietnam draft by crossing the border into the north—where, as it happens, his amateur footage of a deadly chemical flight launches his documentary career. Yet even as his work garners acclaim, Leonard seems to remain a man forever running from himself. "Oh, Canada" is a film steeped in memory, particularly memories of crisis—for Leonard, and perhaps for an entire generation of baby boomers. And because he's on heavy medication, we can never be sure what's real.
Schrader complicates the truth by switching between voice-over and aspect ratios, alternating between color and black-and-white, and having Elordi and Gere intermittently trade places during the flashbacks, so that the older Leonard sometimes wanders through his past, perhaps to revise it. If the effect is disorienting, Gere's performance grounds the film's emotional center. He's always been a deceptively cool and measured actor: the blank surface he presented in "American Gigolo" was a mask for existential despair; the slightly ironic charm he projected in "Pretty Woman" concealed a romantic soul. As Leonard, he's masterful at suggesting a man who can't quite face himself, even though he's spent a lifetime scrutinizing others.
"Oh, Canada" may be adapted from Russell Banks' novel "Foregone" (his "Affliction" provided the basis for Schrader's 1997 film of the same name), but in Schrader's hands, Leonard feels very much like one of the filmmaker's fundamentally lonely drifters, a gallery of anxious men that stretches from his screenplay for "Taxi Driver" to his late-career masterpiece "First Reformed." Inspired by multiple bouts with long COVID, the 78-year-old writer-director seems to be staring down his own mortality here. Whether or not Schrader is working through some of his own issues, it's hard not to see parallels between Leonard and this filmmaker, who has grappled with his relationship to himself and the world through his work on screen.
As Leonard says at one point: "I can't tell the truth unless the camera is on." For Schrader, it's a reflective, largely melancholic mode—which is saying something—even as it's punctuated by fragments of youthful promise, when the future seemed to stretch ahead like an open highway. The film becomes a reckoning for a generation that set out to change the world with their art, their music, their movies—but for whom the end is now rapidly approaching. What do they have to show for it? Did their existence make the world a better place?
Ironically, Leonard is more concerned in the interview with his personal failings than with the work itself. Will he be remembered as a great filmmaker, or simply a bad husband and father? These are the kinds of questions we've come to cherish from Schrader, who, like few filmmakers of his generation, tackles issues of conscience, existence, and theology.
