TIFF 2024: Oh, Canada Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

On paper, Oh, Canada had a lot going for it. Based on the book ‘Foregone’ by Russell Banks, it is Paul Schrader’s next project, adapting the book and directing. Also marking a reunion with star Richard Gere, 44 years after American Gigolo, hype has followed the film since before it premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and understandably so. In an opinion that is likely to fall with the minority, the film does not live up to that hype whatsoever. An erratic mess, in spite of its premise, it is still all over the place while lacking any sort of grounding element to give it any kind of direction. Pushing the unreliable narrator trope to its limits, the result is a frustratingly convoluted watch that seemingly goes out of its way to drag its feet. Without writing or direction to help steer the ship, the film is essentially doomed from the start. Running at around the 90-minute mark, the true story forming the basis of the source material is one arguably befitting of more time to truly do it justice. Instead, the film is merely bits and pieces of a much more interesting story trying to claw to the surface and the way which it tells its story perhaps was not the right one.

That story is about Leonard Fife (Gere), a man who left the United States for Canada to dodge the draft for the Vietnam war. Becoming an acclaimed documentary filmmakers over the decades since, his left an impact on the generations of filmmakers that followed. As Fife’s health took a turn, now in palliative care, he agreed to be interviewed by a group of his former film students, led by Malcolm (Imperioli), for a documentary about his life. Under the watchful eye of his wife Emma (Thurman), as he reached back into his memories as he recounted his story, he became an unreliable narrator of sorts as his story became fractured. Using these fractures as a means to insert some artistic flourishes to play with the idea of perspective, they did little to freshen up what was dull story that avoided what Fife did, in favor of who Fife was. The latter was not nearly as interesting, despite casting Jacob Elordi as the younger Fife.

Ultimately, whatever Oh, Canada may or may not do well on the technical side, it doesn’t matter as the story fails to live up to it. Again, the film, just like any film, lives dies on the connection between it and audiences and there very well may be one here, but the vehicle it takes to make that journey is a flawed one. While Gere, Thurman, and Imperioli are basically irrelevant in the context of the film as a whole, Elordi’s charm and screen presence still make for a compelling figure to watch even though he had very little to do.

In the end, Oh, Canada has plenty of promise behind it but flawed execution over a short running time make for a dull and erratic mess.

 still courtesy of Kino Lorber

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.