NYFF 2024 Review: “Oh, Canada” – A Dull Melodrama!

Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is dealing with a terminal illness leaving him in a wheelchair and bed ridden for most of the day. He is a highly regarded documentary filmmaker whose life is looked at by many as the life of a great and noble man. With little time left, Leonard agrees to share his unfiltered story on film to his former students, demystifying his legacy for the sake of the truth. Oh, Canada joins a list of Paul Schrader films focusing on the external assumptions of men versus the demons they possess in their personal lives and their own self hatred, which includes First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener.

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Where Oh, Canada falls flat is in Schrader’s not so nuanced examination of a man who feels as if his “honorable” life is anything but. It portrays Leonard’s story in a massively melodramatic fashion that struggles to emotionally captivate its audience. Richard Gere’s performance seems disconnected from a sharper and deeper look at men’s regrets later in life.

Intending to create a depressing yet realistic tone to the film instead left this critic feeling neutral and unmoved by Leonard’s story. Oh, Canada strives to expose the hard truth, that at the end of their lives, men will look back and see failure where others see success, regretting their neglect for those around them in place of superficial accomplishments. With this said, this movie wasn’t able to satisfy its own need to be heard, as it focused much more on what was seen.

Leonard is portrayed as an unreliable narrator in the film because of his illness and old age that makes it difficult to identify aspects of his life that happened as he imagined Jacob Elordi plays the younger version of Leonard as the story unfolds through flashbacks. It is said by his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) that he can not identify what is real and what can be attributed to his work over the years that has created a reality combining the two. Unreliable narration can be a cinematic element that allows its audience to fill in their own blanks with room for interpretation.

However, this type of narrator is only as intriguing as the man or woman themselves. Leonard painted himself as a cowardly man who fled to Canada to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War. Where this is an emotional decision that plays on our own fears of mortality, the rest of Leonard’s actions seemed heavily self-indulgent with disregard to how his actions impacted those he “loved” most.

In that sense, seeing a man having to come to terms with the man he is versus what the outside sees him as did not have the emotional pull that the film thought it did. Focusing more on decisions made out of real fear, such as his desertion, would have placed the audience right where Shrader wanted them to be rather than separated from Leonard’s character.

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Filmmaking is an art that pulls in audiences to experience life through windows they never could otherwise. Oh, Canada, although dealing with regret, which is a universal theme, seems to be heavily written and produced to speak to younger and even older men who can sympathize with Leonard’s self hatred for past decisions. Oh, Canada had the ability to capture and take hold of its audience, man or woman, but struggled to expose Leonard for his selfishness towards his female “lovers” while also balancing it with the humanity of a man letting fear control his life.

His own inability to accept himself puts a strain on the love he so often reached out for, which would have been a moving aspect to explore. Schrader’s script felt like a first draft without the needed emotional embellishments, leaving it as an unmemorable submission in his filmography.

‘Oh, Canada’ Rating – 1.5/5

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