Oh, Canada will open in theaters at a date TBD. This review is based on a screening at the Cannes Film Festival. What is death to a man and filmmaker like Paul Schrader? Is it something to be feared? Bitterly laughed at one last time? Faced down with defiance? Sincerely reflected on before it's too late? In Oh, Canada, Schrader’s adaptation of the novel Foregone by his late friend Russell Banks, it’s all of the above and then some.
Though the Taxi Driver screenwriter’s recent run of films – the unofficial “Man in a Room” trilogy of First Reformed , The Card Counter , and Master Gardener – has consisted of similarly troubled protagonists reckoning with their past while facing death (and usually writing in a diary while drinking), his latest operates in a different register entirely. Yes, it is still about a man in a room sorting through his anxieties. But acclaimed documentarian Leonard Fife (Richard Gere, reuniting with Schrader 44 years after American Gigolo) isn’t alone: He’s recounting his life in fragments for a film-within-the-film.
The result is a messy, melancholic, and meandering work that has Schrader looking backward while he pushes forward into new thematic territory. The ailing Leonard has consented to place himself in front of the camera for one final film, with Gere expressing the character’s physical and mental unraveling in frequent coughs and mutters. His only comfort seems to be his wife Emma, played by an underused Uma Thurman, who he de.
