The story is about a famed Canadian documentary filmmaker, Leonard Fife, played by Richard Gere, who is dying and decides to give a final interview to one of his former students to tell the whole truth about his life. The interview becomes a confession which is filmed in front of his wife Emma played by Uma Thurman. The film becomes a film within a film.
Leonard has been fighting a long painfully slow death to cancer and he decides to have two of his students, Malcolm played by Michael Imperioli and Diana played by Victoria Hill shoot a confessional last interview with him as he looks straight into the camera.
Above all Leonard wants to tell the truth about his life just has he has sought as a documentary maker to find the profound truth in the lives of others. But his whole reputation has been built on a lie. He was supposed to have fled the USA for Canada because he objected to the Vietnam war but in fact what he was really running away from was his marriage. He also abandoned his son Cornel played by Zach Shaffer. Fife hasn’t even told his wife Emma about Cornel during their 30 years of marriage.
Richard Gere played in one of Schrader’s earliest films the 1980, American Gigolo. He plays the present day dying Fife while Jacob Elordi plays the young Leonard as we look back on his life.
Schrader uses the film to pay tribute to his late friend Banks, whose ideas inspired one of Schrader’s best films, the 1998 Affliction. The film won critical acclaim and multiple awards. It’s two stars Nick Nolte, who plays a small town policeman, and James Coburn both won Academy Awards for acting for the film.
Oh Canada looks at mortality and what it really means for an artist’s work to live on beyond his mortal lifetime and more profoundly what is truth. Schrader is in his 70s and he has spoken out on social media about his health problems so there is bound to be an autobiographical element to this determination of the artist who seeks truth in his work to confront the truth of his own life.
Credits:
Oh Canada (USA)
Directed by Paul Schrader
Cast: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli, Caroline Dhavernas, Victoria Hill, Kristine Froseth, Penelope Mitchell, Megan MacKenzie, Jake Weary, Ryan Woodle, Sean Mahan, Peter Hans Benson, Scott Jaeck, Cornelia Guest
