Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment. It is based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks (Schrader also adapted Banks’s novel Affliction in 1997) and reunites Schrader with Richard Gere, his star from American Gigolo. Though initially intriguing, it really fails to deliver the emotional revelation or self-knowledge that it appears to be leading up to. There are moments of intensity and promise; with a director of Schrader’s shrewdness and creative alertness, how could there not be? But the movie appears to circle endlessly around its own emotions and ideas without closing in.
The title is partly a reference to the national anthem of that nation, which is a place of freedom and opportunity which may have an almost Rosebud-type significance for the chief character, an avowed draft-resister refugee from the US in the late 60s, who becomes an acclaimed documentary film-maker in his chosen country. Maybe Vietnam was his real reason for fleeing and maybe it wasn’t. This central point is one of many things in this fragmented film which is unsatisfyingly evoked.
The scene is the heavily panelled and grand Canadian house belonging to celebrated director Leonard Fife, played by Gere, who is dying of cancer but has agreed to be interviewed for a highly personal and indeed confessional film co-directed in a spirit of homage by some former film-school pupils, most prominently Malcolm (Michael Imperioli). Leonard is frail and in physical pain and insists on having his wife in his eyeline at all time; this is Emma, played by Uma Thurman.
With what appears to be unflinching honesty, Leonard talks about things that Emma perhaps doesn’t know – and would prefer to believe are just hallucinations due to the pain medication. He had two wives and two children in the US before he met her, and having faked a campy “gay” identity at his army medical to delay the call-up, he fled over the border to Canada with money that his (second) father-in-law had given him to buy a house for him and his wife. Like Updike’s Rabbit, Leonard just decided to run.
How much of his American past does Emma know? She must know some of it; she is shown having to intervene diplomatically when Leonard’s grownup son from his second marriage tries approaching him at a film festival, to Leonard’s icy dismay. At one stage, Leonard seems to be implying that he met Emma when she was the partner of the painter and academic with whom he stayed in the US just before making his break for the border. Thurman plays this younger character herself in these scenes, alongside Jacob Elordi as the younger Leonard. So this could be an example of treacherously unreliable, fictionalised memory. But Schrader, in an earlier scene, has Gere himself play the younger Leonard and the purpose and effect of this is unclear. And there is no showdown with that formidable father-in-law of his, no scene of him ranting and raving at Leonard’s escape and betrayal.
In dramatic terms, the past is clearly in some way being challenged, upended, undermined. But this challenge is not suspenseful or enlightening, resulting merely in cloudiness. Leonard’s deception and self-deception, his various betrayals, if betrayals they are, are not dramatically interesting or even intelligible. As for Imperioli’s character Malcolm, he is apparently respectful and even oleaginous towards Leonard, but finally resorts to an outrageous trick to get hidden footage of the great man on his deathbed. Yet even that betrayal passes without consequence or meaning. This is a film which often seems to have no punches to pull.
• Oh, Canada screened at the Cannes film festival.
