Leo Fife, an acclaimed Canadian documentarian, is rapidly withering away from cancer. With his few remaining breaths, he would like to tell his story. It’s a story no one else fully knows — maybe not even Leo himself.
“You can’t do this,” his wife and artistic partner, Emma (Uma Thurman), pleads with the filmmakers capturing Leo’s final testament. “The drugs are confusing him.”
“It’s what he wants,” Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) implores. He is a student of Leo’s and will stop at nothing to get his movie, even if that means exploiting his subject in his most vulnerable moments.
But what neither Malcolm nor Emma realizes is that Leo wants to be as vulnerable as his mind will allow. Maybe it’s the drugs; maybe it’s the cancer. Hell, maybe it’s the lifetime of mistruths confusing him. To complicate matters, Leo is moving unstuck through his past — sometimes as the younger Leo, played by Jacob Elordi, sometimes as the older Leo, played by Richard Gere — and not getting any closer to the truth.
What is Leo’s grand original sin? The one thing he must atone for before he passes? That’s between him and filmmaker Paul Schrader. The things Leo wants to expose seem to already be exposed. Maybe he told everyone already and forgot. Maybe others suspected it. Maybe, as we see in one of the movie’s final scenes, Leo is a terrible liar and harbors no real secrets. Can you demythologize if the myth never formed in the first place?
Schrader is similar. The movies he makes and the stories he tells are as warts-and-all as you can get. He leaves no stone unturned and offers no real excuses for his behaviors and opinions. That might make some wonder what dirty truths Schrader is still hiding. For those familiar with his films, you get the sense there is nothing left to hide, only the fixation of confession.
Oh, Canada, adapted from Russell Banks’ novel Foregone, fits beautifully within Schrader’s oeuvre. As both a screenwriter and a director, Schrader has always explored the seedy underbelly of artistic compulsion and the horrors the man in the room must bury to move forward. Everyone either is or can be corrupted. And here, the corruption happens with such banality you might wonder what all the fuss is about in the first place. That there’s even a fuss at all is what makes Oh, Canada one of the year’s best.
ON SCREEN: Oh, Canada opens in limited release Dec. 13.