In 'Oh, Canada,' the camera lingers on Jacob Elordi's jockstrap
But there are even better reasons to see this masterful Paul Schrader movie
“This is my final prayer,” says Leo Fife on the day he dies. “When you pray, you’re honest – whether or not you believe in God.”
Fife is Canada’s most celebrated documentary filmmaker. Truth is his business. But he isn’t an honest man. Fife is a character in Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada,” and like many characters Schrader has written, Fife seeks salvation.
Schrader, who is possibly my favorite living writer-director, has a varied filmography. Among other noteworthy films, he’s made a gorgeous, phantasmagorical biopic of a gay Japanese fascist (“Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters”); a gritty, tragicomic crime caper about race and labor (“Blue Collar”); a sympathetic revisionist history of one of America’s most hated women that feels totally contemporary 35 years later (“Patty Hearst”); and a career low where he cast Lindsay Lohan opposite a porn star and the porn star gave the superior performance (“The Canyons”).
But there is one kind of movie that Schrader has made over and over again. Inspired by his love of Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest,” these movies are practically Schrader’s very own genre, known as “man in a room.” “Taxi Driver,” “American Gigolo,” “Light Sleeper,” “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” and “Master Gardener” all are very different on the surface. But at the center of each is an isolated, haunted man sitting at a table in the middle of the night, usually accompanied by a bottle of alcohol, narrating his own downfall in a journal. In the final frames of the movie, after great suffering and usually a lawless, violent turn, the protagonist seeks redemption in the arms of a loving woman. (Whether he finds it is up to you.)
Adapting a novel by Russell Banks (who also wrote the book Schrader’s bonkers Nick Nolte neo-noir “Affliction” was based on), Schrader riffs on his own “man in a room” genre. Call it “man in a documentary.”
On what we are told by a voiceover is the final day of Leo Fife’s life, a team of married documentary filmmakers (Michael Imperoli and Victoria Hill) arrive at the Montreal home Leo shares with his younger wife and collaborator, Emma (a devastating Uma Thurman). They move the Christmas tree (yes, “Oh, Canada” is a Christmas movie!), draw the blinds, and set up an Errol Morris-style Interrotron.
Leo, who is dying of cancer (“the bad kind,” he says), has something to get off his chest before he goes. What he has to say should be a private deathbed confession between two romantic partners. Leo makes the sort of legacy-tarnishing admissions that most artists would be desperate to keep out of the public eye, much to Emma’s dismay. Leo desperately wants Emma to know the real him, but he can’t just tell her on his own that his origin story is a fabrication, or about the women and children left behind in the wake of his selfishness. Somewhere between his artistry and his vanity, he needs the cameras to tell the truth.
Leo isn’t too different from comedian Jerrod Carmichael, whose trainwreck HBO series “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” featured him letting cameras watch just about every single moment of his life that shouldn’t be shared with an audience. We see Carmichael cheat on his boyfriend, lie in couple’s therapy, be a shitty friend, and – most poignantly – menace his homophobic Christian parents, who rely on him financially. When I say trainwreck, I mean it in the sense that you cannot look away from the twisted carnage of Carmichael’s privileged life. Repeatedly Carmichael is asked, sometimes begged, to turn the cameras off. He needs them there, he says. It’s the only way he can really be honest.
I’ve been purposefully vague about why Leo is seeking grace in the truth, because how Scharder and editor Benjamin Rodriguez, Jr. reveal Leo’s sins is one of the great pleasures of this masterful movie. Another is that Leo is a dual role played by Richard Tiffany Gere (that is his actual middle name, look it up) as an old man and Jacob “Babygirl” Elordi as the young Leo.
That these two actors, both sex symbols of their own time, look nothing alike doesn’t matter because they seamlessly occupy a single performance. Gere and Elordi have clearly been studying each other. Watching them both lay on a bed or cut a muffin in the exact same way is a strange thrill.
Sometimes Schrader will cut from Elordi to Gere in a single scene from the past – memory and fantasy coexisting, intermingling. Is this really what happened to Leo? Is this how he’s imagining his life now? Other actors also play dual roles, adding to the glorious confusion. Sometimes the past is still present, no matter how many decades have gone by. As young Leo, Elordi is self-absorbed, egotistical, and furious with the choices life has to offer him. As an old man, Gere still displays the same sky-high self-regard. But the only choices he’s disdainful of are the ones he’s made for himself. “By the time I was 22, I had ruined my life,” old Leo says.
You might be wondering though, do you really want to see an “old guy dying picture,” as Schrader called it during a Q&A after the movie? Of course you do. But not because it’s a beautiful movie about regret and love and truth and forgiveness.
You’re going to want to see “Oh, Canada” because Elordi is in a jockstrap. We see him from behind and then we see him from the front. Handwriting across the jockstrap reads “PEACE AND LOVE.” You get a good, long look at it because there’s a closeup on his bulge for several seconds. If you see “Oh, Canada” in a movie in a theater, which you should, Elordi’s penis line will be like 12 feet tall and 30 feet wide. Oooohhh, Canada, indeed.
That’s a memory you can take with you until the day you die.
“Oh, Canada” is now playing in theaters.
