‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Jacob Elordi as a Young Richard Gere

Near the beginning of “Oh, Canada,” Paul Schrader’s adaptation of his friend Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” a small camera crew is preparing a room for a documentary interview. It’s a beautiful room, with dark wood-paneled walls, antique furnishings, a case containing awards and trophies. It looks like the home of someone who has led an interesting and successful life.

The space belongs to Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a documentarian and something of a left-wing celebrity living in Montreal with his wife and creative partner of many years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Fife is dying. But he’s agreed to allow two former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), themselves documentary filmmakers, to interview him on camera. They are champing at the bit to memorialize him, but Fife’s motives in agreeing are not purely about the film.

The themes running through much of Schrader’s work, especially lately, revolve around redemption — the messiness of it, the possibility of it, the impossibility of it. The man who wrote “Taxi Driver” has, in his 70s, given us “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener,” movies about solitary men wrestling with the task of living in a world that humanity has wrecked, and the dread of discovering oneself personally unforgivable for one’s place in it. A recurring line from “First Reformed” feels like a precis for all of these: Will God forgive us?

“Oh, Canada” circles around this theme, too. But while the men of the recent trilogy have preferred to pour their thoughts into journals, Fife is the kind of person who bottles everything up, able to move forward only by ditching the past. His life — at least before he crossed the border into Canada as a much younger man, leaving everything behind — is a series of secrets that not even his wife was fully aware of. His admirers, and history, see his crossing to Canada as bold protest against the Vietnam draft. But the story is more complicated, and now he feels he must get it off his chest before he crosses another border.

In other words, he must confess. This religious practice, confession, is the beating soul of “Oh, Canada.” It’s signaled early: When the documentary crew is preparing the room for Fife, they awkwardly move a decorated Christmas tree out of the shot, revealing a portrait of some clergyman on the wall. Then, as the filmmakers get started with the shoot, they tell Fife that they’re going to be using the technology he developed, which seems to be the Interrotron we associate with the work of Errol Morris. It creates a way for an interview subject to feel as if they’re maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while actually looking directly into the camera lens. Morris (and, presumably, the fictional Fife) has said that this leads to more revelation. He’s also compared the tool’s results, its ability to rip away self-consciousness, to Freud’s psychoanalysis couch.