Paul Schrader Doesn’t Believe in the Future
Oh, Canada. Credit: Jeong Park. © Oh, Canada LLC.
“To be remembered for something, you have to believe in the future, which I don’t actually believe in.” So says Paul Schrader fresh after screening his newest film Oh, Canada, not quite dismissively, just with a simple bluntness. What does it mean to make art without thinking about its memorability? Is art therapeutic? Is it an emotional escapism, a way to disappear from life? Oh, Canada holds Schrader’s answer.
Oh, Canada follows Leonard Fife, once a Vietnam draft dodger and radical documentary filmmaker, now a sick, introspective, and guilty man. He is asked by two former students to record his story in front of a camera. What Fife recounts is not linear, pleasant, or heroic. He talks about the family he left in Virginia, the books he never wrote, the women he cheated on, and the children he scorned. The documentarians see him as a hero who saved others through politics and art; Fife sees himself as a coward whose art could never exonerate his cruelty.
The story and the film appear as, in Schrader’s terms, a “mosaic” of interlocking moments. There is the day of the shoot. Fife is played by Richard Gere and held close by his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), framed within the smoky wood paneling of a bright hospice care facility. During the saturated 1960s journey from Virginia to Vermont to Canada, Fife is played by Jacob Elordi. Then there are the scattered monochrome blips of everything before and in between. Sometimes these scenes follow one another unceremoniously; tangents multiply until each is completed.
Oh, Canada. Credit: Jeong Park. © Oh, Canada LLC.
Emma objects to Fife’s narrative multiple times during the story, mentioning amidst each recounted act of cruelty that Fife is confused, tired, misremembering, and creating an unfairly damaging or inaccurate vision of his life for sensationalization. Fife gruffly repeats that this is the truest expression of his life, a confession of sorts. We become subject to Fife’s logic alongside his former student documentarians and his wife. We see with them the ways artistic truth, life, causality, legacy, and memory become relative, if not suspect. How the audience processes this whirl is just as calculated a truth as Fife’s ramblings—Schrader points out, “If I hadn’t made it complex, it would have been unnecessarily obtuse.”
Still from Oh, Canada. © Oh, Canada LLC.
Oh, Canada works. It is cogent and poignant because of Schrader’s respect for Fife’s “complex” narrative as much as his character. Any sense of pity one would feel for the “dying desiccated gigolo” (a dry joke from Schrader) is replaced with an attentiveness to and valuation of a warped remembering, a restructuring of importance in a life. If we follow Fife’s winding ramble, we emerge seeing the unshakable ego in art production, its limitations, and its inability to save. To ignore this downfall and see the “real” story Emma insists upon would be “obtuse.”
I couldn’t help but compare Schrader’s film to Florian Zeller’s 2020 The Father. Both films grapple with finding meaning, empathy, and narrative in death and aging through the expressionism of editing and other tricks of the medium. Schrader is defensive of his complexity because his attempt is grander and broader. It is no less personal, yet far less palatable. This isn’t to say Oh, Canada doesn’t also have the prestige performances and emotional landscape of something like The Father. It just allows itself to be slightly less resolved. The goal for Schrader is not simply to inhabit a skewed retelling of life experience, but also to mirror the experience of listening to that retelling.
Fife is often unpleasant—yelling childishly for Emma, berating his former students and sometimes even Emma. Ultimately though, Emma’s protests ring true. Near the completion of his story, Fife is exhausted. Memorializing leeches him until he is drained by his monologue. Is the verbal abuse Fife hurls a signifier that he has not changed? Is it a desire for validation from a woman who has accepted him regardless? Is it a wanting to be validated by so-called truth, to batter emotionally reconstructed narrative with Fife’s repeated canon? Fife feels that if he confesses his sins to the unconditionally loving Emma, he will be forgiven. But perhaps it is his insistence to rewrite his life that causes Emma the most strife.
It is in the moments examining the truth-telling limits of film and narrative that Oh, Canada works best. There’s a directness and earnestness to how obvious the film feels at times, as a meditation on legacy and artistic ability unravels before Fife and Schrader alike. While Schrader does not seem to believe in the future (of film at least), he alludes to multiple new projects in development, each piece the kind of gutsy genre swing of someone enlivened by the medium. Art, storytelling, and legacy—none of these save Fife, and it seems like Schrader doesn’t have much hope either. Still Fife produces. I hope Schrader does too.
