Ecstatic Slipstream

A late-career highlight for director Paul Schrader, and the Criterion Closet goes viral.

In movies like “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener,” it seemed that filmmaker Paul Schrader desperately needed to discard the vigilante-genre shtick on which he’s built part of his reputation and cut to the heart of the regret and loneliness that so obsess him.  In his new “Oh, Canada,” Schrader does just that, and the results are thorny and freeing. This is pure Schrader, straight from the well.

The film is based on “Foregone,” the novel written by Russell Banks not long before his death. Banks was a friend of Schrader’s, and his novel “Affliction” served as the inspiration for one of the director’s best films. At 78, Schrader is no spring chick himself, and his wife, actress Mary Beth Hurt, was diagnosed in 2015 with Alzheimer’s. You don’t need to know these things to be moved by “Oh, Canada,” but they provide context. Schrader deeply means this uncannily vulnerable film, and he knows the turf, staging an exorcism that concerns an acclaimed artist at the brink of death looking into the abyss of his feelings about his life. Banks’ existential agonies are filtered through Schrader’s via a protagonist who suggests prior characters in each man’s career.

Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is an acclaimed documentarian dying of an unspecified cancer. He is an American who fled the Vietnam War to Canada at an early age and who became an institution of that country. A former student of Leonard’s, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), is making a documentary about him, which sets up the framework of “Oh, Canada.” As Leonard speaks into an Errol Morris-style camera set-up that gives a subject the illusion that the interviewer isn’t in the room with him, allowing him to speak head into the camera like a kind of confession booth, Leonard is determined to disrupt his legacy and unburden him of the ugly truth of his life.

I’m delivering this set-up directly for expediency, though information in “Oh, Canada” isn’t offered in so straightforward of a manner. This is an adventurous film that embraces stream-of-consciousness to reflect Leonard’s guilt and confusion over a vast network of betrayals. Sick and on a cocktail of drugs, Leonard tells stories that conflict one another, that seesaw between the past and the present, that bleed people from one era into another. Jacob Elordi plays Leonard as a young man in the late 1960s, when he is married to his second wife, who is pregnant with their second child, and sometimes Elordi will leave a room and Gere will enter, and vice versa.

The site of an aging man talking to a former wife, who, due to the collapsing of timelines, could now visually scan as his granddaughter, as she is forever relegated for him to a past era, is moving. This kind of gambit captures how we remember our past. When you recall something that happened years ago, do you remember yourself as you were then or do you insert the present version of yourself into the story? Our memories are not much more than fictions in many cases, especially when we are as cognitively compromised as Leonard is here.

Leonard’s backstory is elaborate, painful, and purposefully difficult to follow, yet the emotions are always vivid and tangible. He’s had three wives, two children, both of whom he abandoned, and various lovers and groupies and artiste-intellectuals who’re familiar to media superstars. His current wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), who studied with him at the same time as Malcolm and is leery of letting the exploitive classmate get at her husband, seems to be aware of most of Leonard’s demons and finds them to be beside the point. She’s learned to live with them, she knows her partner better than he knows himself, she seems to find his unburdening indulgent, and she, of course, also blurs with other women into the slipstream of Leonard’s past and present.

This stylish, free-associational, and haunted film packs quite a bit of texture, emotional and sociopolitical alike, into its trim 90-some minutes. The coiled relationships between Leonard, Emma, Malcolm, and Malcolm’s wife and collaborator, Diana (Victoria Hill), reflect an entire history of egocentric men who ride the coattails of women who are cowed by the reputation that they themselves helped to foster. There’s a sharp scene, edited into a few seconds, a few shards, in which Leonard talks Emma into being his producer, rather than making her own films. Leonard remembers this as he perceives a similar transactional element between Malcolm and Diana, who Leonard also slept with.

Leonard’s urgency to get everything out right now, while there’s time, reflects that of Schrader, who has been reborn over the last decade, shooting spare productions in a matter of weeks on miniature budgets. Schrader is becoming a master of allowing that sparseness to deepen the expressivity of his films. In certain parts of “Oh, Canada,” the lack of verisimilitude is the verisimilitude. Take early portions that are supposed to be set in Richmond in the late 1960s and that bear a closer resemblance to a melodrama in the mode of Tennessee Williams. The Southern aristocracy, broadly but pungently played here, turns Leonard off and so he remembers it in terms of purple prose.

Take scenes, between Leonard and various hangers-on at a party, sometime before he meets wife number two: very little period décor is used, and the actors speak in a blend of old and new language. Some of this is probably born out of the limited time that Schrader had and no more, but he’s shrewd at allowing such limitations to speak towards the limitations and mythologies of memory.

“Oh, Canada” is perhaps Schrader’s most formally adventurous film since “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.” A variety of aspect ratios and alternations between color and black and white visualize Leonard’s internal states of being, with the central recurring image of Leonard’s face on a monitor representing a particular coup of cinema. It’s as if Leonard has forged with the medium of his choice, and in certain sequences Schrader cuts between isolated compositions of Leonard and Emma respectively blown up onto separate monitors. They are together yet oceans apart. Leonard, leaving the realm of living, is apart from everyone.

Reunited with Schrader for the first time since “American Gigolo” in 1980, Gere is focused and wrenchingly unsentimental. Like Schrader, Gere is a pro who has pared his work down to the bare essentials, reflecting a character whose narrowing time has fostered a kind of necessary economy of speech, thought, movement, as well as a limited capacity for nonsense. And yet, everyone sees that Leonard’s “looking back” is a higher form of nonsense—an all-too-understandable gesture before exiting the house. That irony informs “Oh, Canada” with toughness that’s not without empathy, or grace.

 

Have you watched any of the Criterion Closet picks? They are on Criterion’s YouTube channel, and they are becoming a low-key addiction of mine. Actors and filmmakers enter the Criterion Collection’s highly touted closet and pick Blu-rays and tell the camera why these are the films that are going home with them. It is one of those simple ideas that can say much more about people and art than perhaps anyone has ever intended. It’s an idea that connects to our need for physical tangibility in this age in which everything is ordered online. These little shorts bring us back to the realm of the video store, the land in which geeks and their opinions became an art onto itself.

Every famous person has a different vibe, which is less guarded than one has come to expect from modern talk shows. For cinephiles, the Criterion Closet is the ultimate toy store, and toys bring out the kids in us. Paul Giamatti casually reveals his erudite nerdery, Ethan and Maya Hawke touchingly reveal their bond as father-daughter artists. Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche are a refined dry-comedy team, and so on. If you’re in a pinch for something to watch, try a few of these 5-minute shorts, and you’ll be buzzing with dozens of titles. They are also a way to socialize without going into the cold.

“Oh, Canada” is now streaming on VOD. The Criterion Closet picks can be found on YouTube. 

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