Director – Paul Schrader – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 94m
***
A documentary filmmaker dying of cancer consents to a filmed interview about his life and work to air his dirty laundry – on UK and Ireland digital platforms on Monday, January 12th
“Remind me why I agreed to do this,” says the ageing Leonard Fife, aka Leo (Richard Gere, from Schrader’s earlier American Gigolo, 1980) setting up for a filmed interview, about his life and work as a documentary filmmaker, at which he has insisted his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), a former student of his, be present. His interviewer Malcolm (Michael Imperioli from Song Sung Blue, Craig Brewer, 2025; The White Lotus, TV series, Mike White, 2021; The Sopranos, TV series, 1999–2007) is another former student, as is Malcolm’s producer Diana (Victoria Hill from First Reformed, Master Gardener, 2022, both Paul Schrader), another former student conquest of Leo’s; Malcolm’s production assistant is 24-year old Sloan (Penelope Mitchell from Sting, Kiah Roache-Turner, 2024; Hellboy, Neil Marshall, 2019; The Vampire Diaries, TV series, 2014-15; Hemlock Grove, TV series, 2013).
What lies behind Leonard’s acceptance of the gig swiftly becomes clear when he hijacks the first question, framing it with a date in 1968 of great significance in his personal life. Rather than talk at any great length about his films – about which he seems to think he’s already said everything worth saying elsewhere – Leo wants to talk about his own life, specifically his various marital infidelities and other significant life decisions. His investigative documentary films have traded on exposing the wrongdoings of specific individuals in high places, dangerous ground perhaps for a man reputed to have dodged the draft to get out of serving in the Vietnam War.
The date in 1968 was the one on which his younger self (Jacob Elordi from Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro, 2025; Priscilla, Sofia Coppola, 2023; Saltburn, Emerald Fennel, 2023) and his then wife Alicia (Kristine Froseth from How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, Daniel Garber, 2022; The Assistant, Kitty Green, 2019) visited her parents’ home in the Southern US. His father-in-law Ben Chapman makes Leo a very good offer, which would make him the CEO of their prosperous family business, because all the potential heirs within the family are women and Ben and his brother don’t think any of them are up to the task. Leo is currently writing his first novel – not, as he confides to friends, that it’s any good – and Ben points out that, since being CEO would only require abut five hours a week, it would give Leo all the time he needs to write.
Leonard has other objections, though, which he has no intention of voicing; he despises his in-law’s conservative values and wants to move his family as far away from them as possible. To this end, he’s about to take up an academic position and buy a property in Vermont, which will put the in-laws at a much greater distance. CEO of the family business might be a very good offer, but there’s no way he is going to accept it.
Alicia turns out not to be Leonard’s first wife – Emma is the fourth – and he has had a long history of abandoning relationships and committing infidelities. Indeed, while he’s staying with an old artist friend Stanley Reinhardt (Jake Weary from How to Blow Up a Pipeline, 2022; It Follows, David Robert Mitchell, 2014; Animal Kingdom, TV series, 2016-2022; As the World Turns, TV series, 2005) in Vermont to finalise the property purchase, he gets a phone call from Alicia’s mother Jessie telling him his wife has had a miscarriage. He chats glibly with Stanley about the situation, and later when Stanley’s wife Gloria (Thurman again) comes on to him he has sex with her, demonstrating no loyalty either to his wife and first son or to his old friend. The next day, perhaps on a whim, he crosses the border into Canada.
While with first wife Amy (Penelope Mitchell again) Leonard embarks on an affair with Amanda (Megan MacKenzie) before becoming involved with Alicia. When years later he (now played by Gere) is approached by Cornel (Zach Shaffer), his son with Alicia, at a retrospective of Leo’s films, he publicly declares that no such person exists, leaving wife Emma to take the man for a coffee and talk about it (although she, too, refuses to keep in touch with Cornel).
Based on a novel by Russell Banks, whose Affliction Schrader filmed in 1997, this is seen by the director as being about mortality. Given Schrader’s Calvinist upbringing, it’s hard not to equally read it as a meditation on the rite of Confession. Not that the reference points are specifically Christian or even religious – when Leonard is put in front of the family priest (Gary Hilborn) by Alicia to try and talk things through, he clearly lacks sympathy for either the institution of the Church or for the religion it purports to propagate. Yet, there’s a definite feeling about the piece of a man realising he’s made a lot of bad decisions in his life, and wanting to get them off his chest.
The screenplay flashes back and forth between the frame device filming of the interview and the events Leonard describes within it. The older, Gere version of the character is close to death, is attended by a nurse named Rene (Caroline Dhavernas), and at times drops off. You’re not always sure whether you’re watching flashback or dream sequence as the lines between reality, dreams and imagined memory become blurred. Schrader understands what he’s doing with voice over to take us into the flashbacks, yet those flashbacks – or memories or dream sequences or whatever – can sometimes be hard to place in the overall scheme of things at times. The screenplay is an adaptation of a novel, and one wonders, not having read that novel, if it would play rather better in that form than it does in this film.
Jacob Elordi essentially plays a young version of the older Richard Gere, and it’s fascinating to watch the younger actor mimicking the subtle mannerisms of the older one. It’s a good thing he does, because in looks alone, you don’t imagine Elordi ageing and becoming Gere, but the mannerisms go a long way to sell the idea. The cast generally give good performances, yet the whole somehow proves one of Schrader’s less satisfying efforts as writer, director or hyphenate. It might in part be to do with Leonard’s reprehensibility as a human being, but equally dubious Schrader-penned characters played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Willem Dafoe in Light Sleeper (1992), Woody Harrelson in The Walker (2007), Joel Edgerton in Master Gardener (2022), or indeed Gere himself in American Gigolo (1980), prove strangely compelling, and take the audience with them to dizzying heights of moral quandary. It is somehow difficult for the current Gere / Elordi character to similarly bring the audience along with their character.
Oh, Canada is out on UK and Ireland digital platforms on Monday, January 12th.
Trailer: