Sappiness isn’t a word associated with Paul Schrader, the writer/director who helped shape the New Hollywood era with his tales of mortality and self-destruction. The 78-year-old filmmaker has enjoyed the controversy that his views generate, as his Facebook rants have tackled such diverse subjects as the diversification of the Academy Awards, the growth of artificial intelligence in media, the impact of “cancel culture,” and his supposed nemesis, Brian De Palma.
Schrader’s collaborations with Martin Scorsese were significant because he transformed violent, abusive characters like Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta into pathetic, tragic figures; while Schrader did show the trauma that led these men into cycles of abuse and destruction, there was never a risk that his dissection would be misinterpreted as sympathetic. Schrader’s solo efforts have ambitiously spotlighted members of “fringe groups” who take on even more insidious systems. The priest-turned-suicide bomber played by Ethan Hawke in First Reformed is the inadvertent protagonist in a story about the devastating impact of climate change, and Oscar Isaac’s icy gambler from The Card Counter was an unlikely revolutionary set on dismantling America’s military-industrial complex.
Schrader’s critics have often dismissed his films as needlessly inflammatory; why else would he craft a redemptive drama about a former white supremacist in Master Gardener? This surface-level reading doesn’t account for the significant degree of pain that Schrader subjects his characters to, as there’s nothing theoretical to the onscreen suffering that he depicts. Schrader’s latest film, Oh, Canada, doesn’t have the genre components that made neo-noir thrillers like Light Sleeper or American Gigolo attractive to audiences. However, it’s oddly the most sincere confession that Schrader has ever made about the complex relationship that he has with his own work.
Oh, Canada is loosely based on the Russell Banks novel Foregone, but this isn’t the first time Schrader has willfully drawn from material he’s only partially interested in; his adaptation of Banks’ mystery thriller Affliction imbued the story with more melancholic paternal angst than there was in the original text. Nonetheless, Oh, Canada does replicate the non-linear narrative structure of the book to tell the story of Leonard Fife, a documentary filmmaker who’s decided to share details of his life, winding down, in an interview. Flashbacks feature Fife portrayed by Jacob Elordi, while the present scenes have Schrader’s American Gigolo star, Richard Gere, in what’s easily his best role since his tap-dancing performance in the 2002 adaptation of the hit musical Chicago.
Even Schrader’s most experimental works follow an identifiable structure; a man’s confronted by the world’s cruelty, has a crisis of confidence, and is enticed to take radical action, which has generally resulted in a tragedy. Oh, Canada is able to undercut this simplistic reading of Leonard’s experiences because he has no control over the way his life has been interpreted. With his former student Malcolm (played by The Sopranos’ star Michael Imperioli in a comeback role) as the director of his mentor’s narrative, Leonard can only provide half-truths and slanted admissions on his experience as a draft-dodger that fled to Canada during the Vietnam War. It’s easier for Malcolm and his colleagues to collect evidence that suits the narrative they’ve constructed; Leonard’s not capable of defiance when his memory is so crippled.
Whether Schrader’s intention was to satirize the willful ignorance of contemporary media is ambiguous, as there’s not enough evidence to suggest that Malcolm had reason to doubt Leonard’s recollections. Schrader does indicate that it's impossible to lionize acts of heroism without proper context. Leonard’s decision to abandon the war effort was hailed as the first act of civil disobedience that drew him to make confrontational art. In reality, Leonard’s draft-dodge was the result of his attempt to focus on a novelist’s career. He also happened to abandon his family and make use of the privilege granted to him; while not entirely devoid of nobility, Leonard didn’t contain any wisdom as a young man that needed to be protected.
The ambiguity of what Schrader’s intentions are is linked to Leonard’s own insecurities; his life went down such a divergent path that the memories he had of himself as a young man feel like those of an entirely different person. Putting Gere and Elordi on screen together is a less subtle way to show this, but it’s effective because both versions of the character are at a distance from the viewer. It’s also a clever piece of casting; Gere’s a former Hollywood heartthrob who abandoned the spotlight, and Elordi is a rising star who’s used the clout of his Euphoria fame to appear in arthouse films like Saltburn and Priscilla.
It’s no coincidence that shortly after pandemic and the SAG-AFTRA strikes, both of which temporarily shut down the industry, many auteurs channeled their anxieties into self-reflective projects. The issue is that many of these endeavors are simply the result of clout; Francis Ford Coppola tried to address the collapse of artistic exceptionalism in Megalopolis, Robert Zemeckis attempted to summarize baby boomer anxieties in Here, and even Kevin Costner offered a revisionist interpretation of the birth of the “wild west” in Horizon: An American Saga. Schrader’s use of Leonard as a stand-in character to represent his own career could seem presumptuous, but his fans should be grateful that his objective is only to address material that he has a personal connection with.