Oh, Canada
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
Stars: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi
Writer/Director: Paul Schrader
Streaming on Prime and Apple TV
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Forty-five years ago, two young Hollywood hotshots — actor Richard Gere and writer/director Paul Schrader — teamed up to forge a stylish erotic thriller that would reverberate from Basic Instinct to Miami Vice and beyond.
American Gigolo made Gere a star and cemented Schrader among America’s most daring filmmakers. It seems inconceivable that it has taken the pair this long to reconnect — in a film that could hardly land farther from the one that made them legend. As a drama about the convergence (and frequent divergence) of memory and history, Oh, Canada may be a hit-and-miss affair, but the two old pros attack the project with such fervor we can’t help but stick with them until the painfully subdued fadeout.
Gere plays Leo Fife, a celebrated documentary filmmaker and university professor who is dying of cancer. As a final gesture to a former student (The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli), Leo agrees to become the subject of his new film, sitting for one last extended interview in the bedroom of his Montreal home. Ominously, Leo insists that his third wife, Emma (Uma Thurman) sit just off camera, explaining that there are things he has to say that she has never heard before.
What follows is a narrative that traces Leo’s life story beginning in 1960s Virginia. Played by Jacob Elordi — who costarred as Elvis Presley in 2023’s Priscilla — young Leo, an aspiring novelist, callously abandons his first wife (The Vampire Diaries’ Penelope Mitchell) and their infant son to pursue a college teaching job in Vermont. It’s just the first in a long list of selfish decisions — usually involving the pursuit of a new woman — that Leo confesses to in the course of the interview. His increasingly alarmed wife tries repeatedly to stop the session, but Leo pushes onward, despite the fact that he is getting weaker by the minute.
The performances of the cast are all razor-sharp, in contrast to Leo’s narrative, which at times seems fogged by drugs and illness; the muddled nature of Leo’s memories — and the apparent interchangeability of the women in Leo’s life — is reflected in Schrader’s choice to have Thurman play both Emma and the wife of an old friend, while Mitchell portrays both Leo’s first wife and the modern-day filmmaker’s production assistant.
Time and again, Emma and the documentary team struggle to decipher which of Leo’s memories are authentic, which are conflated, and which he is tailoring to fit his chosen biography. Even the choice that has defined Leo’s career and endeared him to Progressives throughout North America — his decision to flee to Canada rather than fight in the Vietnam War — may (or may not) have been framed in a lie.
Still among our most gifted screen actors, Gere proves once more how far he has come in the decades since he reigned as Hollywood’s premier pout-faced pretty boy. As in the old days, Gere still holds his characters’ emotions behind a handsome mask, but few actors can evoke as much anger, distrust, and pain in the movement of the eyes, or the tightening of a jaw. His old colleague Schrader knows when to keep the camera rolling, waiting for those almost subliminal revelations.
Ultimately, whether Leo’s self-fashioned biography is based on truths or fallacies proves irrelevant. The filmmaker gets the literal deathbed confessional that will catapult his career, and Leo gets the final say on his life story. It’s a fitting footnote to the lifework of Gere and Schrader, two men who have spent the decades since their former collaboration brashly setting their own agendas: Gere in outspoken support of the people of Tibet (with much cost to his career), and Schrader, who after exploding onto the scene with scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, stubbornly insisted on continuing to make gritty, intensely focused character dramas that, while gaining critical acclaim, seldom drew major box office success.
Leo would approve. Or maybe not.
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Comments
This seems like something worthwhile, despite any shortcomings or flaws otherwise. You’re right about ‘American Gigolo’, released in 1980 and it’s influence on the whole look of the ’80s that would follow. When I first saw the trailer for it in late ’79, there wasn’t a trace of the slovenly ’70s left. In all fairness, the trend to looking good/sharp was already under way with ‘Saturday Night Fever’ 2 years earlier.
The graphics in ‘Gigolo’ were amazing to me. The ‘sliced’ look of the blinds and shadows definitely influenced art projects I did not long after that, and still do to this day. The opening of the show ‘Dynasty’ used the effect splendidly. Didn’t watch it otherwise, the opening was the best part.
‘Gigolo’ wasn’t that great a film otherwise though, but it didn’t need to be. This thing was all about style combined with that FANTASTIC Giorgio Moroder soundtrack, mainly featuring different versions of Blondie’s “Call Me’ I regularly listen to when driving.
‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ from 1968 though very different, was also not a great film, but didn’t need to be either. It also had so much style, substance didn’t matter. It’s the opposite of what I normally seek out in a film, but these 2 weren’t normal. ‘Crown’ unfortunately didn’t have real life influence on style. Indeed, the ’70s were the worst decade of the 20th in all these regards, until the final years, getting the ’80s off to the right start right away.
‘Miami Vice’ absolutely. Music videos. Glenn Frey’s ‘You Belong To The City’ one of the best examples. No more dated, long-haired hippie look. The blonde in the pastel blue dress was almost an ’80s version of MM had she been that age then. Style, a good story with that incredible song and saxophone. 40 years later, better than ever. Unlike ‘Gigolo’ and ‘Crown’, it’s aged very well in all respects.