Robert DeNiro turned it down and so Richard Gere wound up with another decent role, in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, a cool look at “heroic” types who have done little more than hitch a ride on a wave.
Gere plays a crusading documentarian who, stricken with terminal cancer at the end of his life, is being interviewed by old students – now famous themselves – for a last hurrah. Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill) are here to celebrate the man and his valiant work. That’s the dying Leo’s initial intention, too. But, unsure of himself and realising that this is his last chance to set the record straight, he switches track some way into the interview process and starts giving his old students and posterity the unvarnished version of his life story. This is big, the unsettled Malcolm and Diana realise. For Leo’s wife Sloan (Uma Thurman), clearly the keeper of the flame, all the alarm bells are ringing simultaneously.
Leo Fife’s story is one of dodging the draft in 1960s America and heading to Canada. His first documentary happens by accident, when he notices intense spraying of crops while working on a farm. The chemical is Agent Orange and the government is illegally testing it on farm workers. Made on the fly, Fife’s documentary film about the shady goings-on is a hit and leads on to other projects. Before he knows it, Leo is a name in the field of the crusading documentary. His catalogue of films includes one about the sexual abuse of First Nation children. About the clubbing of seals. About the abuse of more children, this time by clerics.
This much everyone already knows; it’s on the record. But the parallel story Leo is keen to get off his chest is of running away from his first wife while she is pregnant with his child, the first of a series of affairs with other men’s wives and with the young students who start flocking to his lectures after he becomes famous. Ultimately he finds Sloan – eventually you marry the nurse, as old rock stars used to say.
The story beneath these stories is one not of heroism but of simply going with the flow. When a new woman comes along Leo goes with her. When the world is hungry for a story about sexual abuse or animal cruelty, he obliges. He’s spent his life simply pushing at an open door, almost surprised at how easily it opens.
Schrader’s films have always had a confessional, redemptive element – going as far back as Taxi Driver (which he wrote). Here he’s more interested in simply laying it all out there, the better to consider the virtue or otherwise of progressive action in a world that is progressive itself. By extension, how a slight change in the political weather can really wreak massive cultural change. The progressives, where are they now, he seems to be asking. Maybe they were never there in the first place.
So it’s a story for our times, albeit a small one. Luckily for Schrader, he has one of the men of the moment, Jacob Elordi, as the young libidinous Leo. Schrader apparently had no idea who Elordi was when he was being lined up for the role. A stroke of luck there, I’d say. Luckily also, Richard Gere is a much better actor than he’s usually given credit for and is crackingly good as both the old, scofulously sick Leo and as the middle-aged version, still womanising and so heartlessly self-focused that he, almost biblically (Schrader loves a bit of Bible), denies his own adult son when he’s introduced to him long after he’s fled wife number one’s coop.
It’s the unheroic, non-anthemic, combative story of the “radical” 1960s, in a way, when people like Leo (and Schrader) followed the pack and were lifted by a rising tide. There is score-settling going on here and the obvious audience – boomers – are probably the people least likely to want to be told their lives, potentially, were little more than virtue-signalling. Schrader, wandering towards 80 when he made this, still has things he wants to say.
Oh, Canada – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
