DRAMA; 1hr 35min
STARRING: Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli
Oh, Leo! Gere and Thurman
In 2023, cancer-ridden Leonard Fife (Gere) is holding himself to account on camera, as he has famously done throughout the years with his documentary subjects. Leo’s former student Malcolm (Imperioli) is behind the lens while wife Emma (Thurman) is a forbearing witness. Malcolm’s two offsiders and a nurse are on board, as well, but this is kingpin Leo’s last hurrah and he insists on staging it in his own, peremptory way, launching into its disjointed narrative with an evening in 1968, when young Leo (Elordi), his pregnant wife Alicia (Kristine Froseth) and their young son are visiting her parents in Virginia.
That night will be a point of no return for Leo, who by his early 20s has been married twice and fathered two children. By any definition, he’s a womanising wild duck, with a roving eye and a ravenous ego. “Your career is an emblem of political film-making,” a reverential Malcolm assures the ravaged man before him. Ah, but what of Leo’s Vietnam War draft-dodging, the women he has left in his wake and the son he cruelly denied?
Master Gardener writer-director Paul Schrader — he also directed Gere in 1980’s American Gigolo — takes a scattershot approach with his adaptation of Russell Banks’s 2021 novel, Foregone. Mirroring Leo’s fractured and medicated state of mind, the screenplay see-saws from peacockish Elordi Leo to his professorial, second-act self (Gere again), who sometimes also pops up in act one, to the present-day curmudgeon he has aged into and back again.
Shot in colour and black-and-white, the effect is a kaleidoscope of calculated incoherence, which doesn’t bode well for emotive impact but at least keeps viewers on their artistic toes. As the measure of a man, Oh, Canada (to which Leo absconds after bailing on Alicia) is no pretty picture, let alone a cohesive one. Yet as the distillation of hazily recollected decades, the diffuse pieces — and Leo’s frantic need to reconcile them at the end — tell their own illuminating story.
