Screening times:
Saturday, Dec 14, 5:30 PM - SOLD OUT
Saturday, Dec 14, 7:45 PM - SOLD OUT
Paul Schrader | USA | 2024 | 95m
with Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, and Jacob Elordi
Fiery but feeling his years and his illness, ailing documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) sits for an extended interview with Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), a former student. Finally revealing the truth and lies in his life and career, Leonard charges ahead with candid stories about his younger self (Jacob Elordi) in the fractious 1960s, and beyond. At Leonard’s insistence, his wife and indispensable partner, Emma (Uma Thurman), hears it all.
What begins as an interview turns into a personal reckoning and a sparring match over love and legacy. Fife uses the interview as a confessional, while his need to cleanse his spirit and shake off his celebrated myth may be the only thing still keeping him alive. In this, the film also takes time to explore the idea of an unreliable narrator. Is famed filmmaker Leonard Fife actually a coward, or is the story he's telling clouded by illness and unfair self-recrimination?
Oh, Canada adapts Foregone, the novel by Russell Banks, whose book, Affliction, served as source material for Schrader's critically lauded film of the same name in 1997. Schrader is probably best known for his collaborations with Martin Scorcese, having written Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. His films as a director, including Light Sleeper, First Reformed, and The Card Counter, frequently feature powerful tales of deeply compromised men seeking some kind of redemption. This one is no different.
"There’s much to like here, particularly in Gere’s vulnerable performance and just how openly Schrader is expressing what feels like his own concerns about aging, regret, and reputation." - Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
"Schrader bravely forsakes the narrative fastidiousness of his recent work and takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning, to formally ragged but sincerely moving effect." - Justin Chang, New Yorker
"Oh Canada is not just about filmmaking, it is a homage to storytelling as a lifeline." - Savina Petkova, AwardsWatch
Tickets $8.75 ($8 cash at the door if available).
