In Oh, Canada, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) teaches a photography class to a small group of students. He writes "Reality vs. Fiction" across the whiteboard and begins analyzing Eddie Adams's famous 1968 photograph "Saigon Execution." The photo captured the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner by a brigadier general and won Adams a Pulitzer Prize. Leonard explains his belief that the subjects in it are alive forever each time the image is seen. Emma (Uma Thurman), one of the students, challenges this point, arguing the opposite — the man being shot in the photograph is dying forever each time the image is seen.
Oh, Canada sheds itself like a snake layer by layer — and then puts back on a layer, then sheds two more, until we're unsure where we are in the process or what it is we're looking at. Within Paul Schrader's robust career as a writer and director, Oh, Canada fills a sentimental and more self-reflective slot in his filmography. A fictional story based on the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks — about a documentarian turned subject in the late years of his life for a film about his work — the layers have their own layers in this narrative.
Leonard, played by Gere in later years and Jacob Elordi as a young man, is an American who fled to Canada in the 1960s to avoid being drafted in the Vietnam War. He became a prolific political documentarian, and in the present day, terminally ill with cancer, Leonard decides to tell his life story, warts and all, making his final testament to the film crew interviewing him.
Non-linear storytelling, ever-changing aspect ratios, a constant switch from colour to black and white, and a blurred line between past and present, reality and fiction are all used to untangle the myth of an artist's legacy. Whether it's due to his ailing health or his deliberate choice to misconstrue and rearrange certain anecdotes of his past, Leonard is an unreliable narrator. Gere becomes suddenly inserted into various scenes from the past that should have Elordi as Leonard, interacting with the younger versions of other characters or figures from Leonard's life decades ago. Memories stop and start over as Leonard tries to remember them the way he experienced them.
It's clear Scharder designed the film to disorient viewers and make them reflect on their own perception of events throughout their lives, which is effective. But Oh, Canada, though backed by solid performances and interesting visuals and editing, doesn't feel emotionally gripping enough to leave a lasting impact, and its storytelling approach veers into muddy territory.
Gere delivers a career-standout performance. Leonard is skittishly frustrated and riddled with sombre guilt, and Gere makes each emotion feel fleshed out and measured without overdoing it or leaning too much into the grumpy-old-man archetype. Elordi also gives a strong performance, embodying a silent vulnerability as he drifts in and out of the story and haunts older Leonard with the ghostly presence of his past.
Thurman and the documentary film crew (Michael Imperioli, Victoria Hill and Penelope Mitchell) deliver decent performances, with Thurman being the most notable supporting character out of the bunch as Leonard's student-turned-wife, although she isn't given much to do in the script besides all the doting duties that come with that role.
It's a shame, with Gere and Elordi putting plenty of soul into their respective portrayals, that we don't get to know Leonard as a person all too deeply. His character feels just as much a mystery by the end of the film as he did at the beginning, with a few more holes in his armour if anything. He's selfish and cowardly and trying to confess his mistakes, but his insights into why he lived his life the way he did or why he feels the way he does aren't explored, at least not fully.
Andrew Wonder's cinematography and Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.'s editing go hand in hand to create a visual paradox, the former crafting scenic landscapes and raw close-ups resembling nostalgic postcards and portraits, and the latter taking scissors and jaggedly cutting them up. In the times it works, it works — the contrast makes a person's memory and perception feel like tangible, fragmented things. It can also leave large chunks of the story feeling incomplete, or like viewers have just listened to an aimless ramble sans conclusion. The pieces to a cohesive story are there, but they lack the connective tissue needed to weave them together.
Die-hard Schrader fans will have a field day dissecting the film and connecting it to his own relationship with his legacy as a filmmaker. Leonard's inconsistent recounting reveals the life eclipsed by his career — an artistic public-facing one that can easily be projected upon by others. He was an avoidant man who treated the women in his life as disposable, and, at the end of a long life, is just as much that guy who fled Virginia as he is the trailblazing celebrity, now seeking some form of atonement through his confessions.
Oh, Canada is a story about recontextualization. Like Eddie Adams's photograph, it comes alive or dies depending on each individual interpretation of events.