Paul Schrader panders to his political past.
Nostalgia for Sixties radicalism infects Hollywood. Robert Redford’s cheesy ’60s remembrance The Company You Keep tried to rekindle romance between members of the Weather Underground while The Big Chill showed that anti–Vietnam War college students eventually lost their idealism. Paul Schrader’s new film Oh, Canada is no better, taking up the case of a Vietnam-era draft dodger who fled the U.S. to Canada and forged a regret-filled life of shallow principles.
It would be fascinating had Schrader’s film shed light on his peers in Hollywood’s ’70s American Renaissance, Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, Spielberg, Bogdanovich, Ashby, Lucas. They all shared esteem for John Ford’s The Searchers, a totem of American conservatism, yet none of those movie brats displayed any political commitment beyond the quasi liberalism necessary to hold good industry standing.
The pointlessly fragmented Oh, Canada presents aged filmmaker Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) as a study in moral cowardice. In his youth (played by Jacob Elordi), Fife was classified 1-Y by his draft board (“that means you’re only called up in case of total mobilization”). He escaped the duties of citizenship, relocated up north and — against previous inclinations — became a political documentarian. French-Canadians praise him an “artiste engagé” and a local hero like Glenn Gould.
But Schrader is a superficial artist; his films always seem disengagé. Adapting the last novel of Canadian writer Russell Banks (the source of Schrader’s foul 1998 Affliction), Schrader goes pseudo-profound: Fife’s final days become the subject of a documentary-biography made by his former college students, a generation that looks back on leftist radicalism (and the Lincoln Brigade) with admiration. Their naïveté mixed with Schrader’s stodgy solemnity is a buzzkill.
Fife is a surrogate for 78-year-old Schrader’s own affectations, trading Schrader’s existential dramas for Fife’s documentaries about ecology, the Vietnam War, and Catholic Church sex scandals. The idea of Fife’s exceptional probity is contradicted by the fact that he never took a particular moral or political stance in his life. Media hustler Fife takes a swipe at his PBS counterpart Ken Burns. He confesses past sins (several failed marriages, the betrayal of close relations, and an always abrasive ego — plus, the film is narrated by Fife’s estranged son). Yet Schrader seems insensitive to the sorrow and sagacity that John Huston made palpable in his adaptation of Under the Volcano by another Canadian author, Malcolm Lowery.
Schrader, the film critic turned screenwriter turned director, enjoys éminence grise status as though it was his scripts for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ that supplied their serious substance. But Schrader himself has directed 24 films (Mishima, Affliction, Light Sleeper, First Reformed, ad nauseam) that are notable for only three reasons: an obsession with obsessional figures, their stylistic inertia, and a worshipful Millennial film cult that seems to know as little about cinematic art as Schrader himself.
Oh, Canada is the latest case of Schrader’s undeserved esteem. It is so shamelessly meta that the Schrader cult, responding to gossip about his private misfortunes, excuses the film’s self-exploitation like it was a profound examination of cinema itself.
Consider the trendiness that has befallen Schrader’s confreres Spielberg, Scorsese, and Coppola, who energized the 1970s but since then have become culturally obtuse and irrelevant. Those movie-brat colleagues were not especially topical, but their films — Greetings, Hi, Mom!, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, Mean Streets, Carrie — defined the post-’60s zeitgeist and connected their fondness for movie history to the prevailing social attitudes.
Cinéaste Schrader should have modeled this film on Providence, Alain Resnais’s extraordinarily complex, fluid, anti-nostalgic look back at life mistakes by a dying old man (John Gielgud). Instead, Schrader recasts his old American Gigolo — Gere’s wisps of white hair, unshaven beard, and wheelchair mostly recall a pouty version of elderly Henry Miller in Warren Beatty’s Reds.
Oh, Canada’s flashbacks to the generation of anti-war, anti-American radicals are muddled and unconvincing about how personal and political issues collide. There’s no sense of the conscientious-objector concerns known from Vietnam-era films. Instead, Oh, Canada turns inward, typical of Schrader and the semi-seditious narratives of West Side Story, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Megalopolis. Finally, Oh, Canada is absurdly mistimed for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s current nation-wrecking implosion. It caters to anti-American Hollywood and an inept filmmaker’s narcissism.