Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi shine in Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada, partly set in Montreal

In a beautiful apartment in Old Montreal, a dying documentary filmmaker recounts his life. An uncooperative and occasionally confused subject, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere in the present), uses the documentary as an opportunity to tell his beloved wife Emma (Uma Thurman) the secrets of his past. An adaptation of a Russell Banks novel (Paul Schrader’s second), Oh, Canada covers decades of history. It’s a labyrinthian deathbed confession, brimming with nuance, contradiction and regret. Jacob Elordi plays a young Fife, channelling the eroticism of a young Gere — we have a film that seems to come full circle with early Schrader obsessions laid bare in films like Mishima and American Gigolo. Here though, the revolution and vitality of youth has been worn down and exhausted. It’s a movie charged with the desperate intensity of time running out; a chase film where the characters are running from death.

In some ways a frustrating experience, Oh, Canada has a circular cycle, an occasionally rushed pace, that never quite answers any of the questions laid out by the documentarians. Yet that’s what makes the film so compelling. As we witness a man grappling with his story and how he wants to tell it, he focuses on the “in-betweens” of history and the preoccupations of his biographers are of little interest to him. As his life slips through his fingers, he’s worried about his wife, his children and the pain he’s wrought rather than his accomplishments. Gere in particular delivers a performance that undeniably evokes Schrader in 2024 — he’s gruff, intense and thoughtful. There’s pathos without sentimentality, and the film’s final act has such incredible earnestness that it even manages to sell the titular Canadian anthem as a surprisingly tender reflection on yearning. It’s a profoundly human film that manages by omission to capture the sum of a life lived. One of Schrader’s best. ■

This review was originally published as part of our Cannes 2024 coverage.

Oh Canada is now playing in Montreal theatres.

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