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OH, CANADA

Producers: Luisa Law, Meghan Hanlon, Scott Lastaiti, Tiffany Boyle and David Gonzales  Director: Paul Schrader  Screenplay: Paul Schrader   Cast: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli, Caroline Dhavernas, Victoria Hill, Kristine Froseth, Penelope Mitchell, Megan MacKenzie, Jake Weary, Ryan Woodle, Sean Mahan, Peter Hans Benson, Scott Jaeck, Cornelia Guest, Gary Hilborn and Aaron Roman Weiner   Distributor: Kino Lorber

Grade: C+

Under the best of circumstances, the act of remembering is a kind of excavation, a rummaging about in partial recollections embellished or diminished over time.  And when the process is encumbered by a habit of deception and invention, and by the mental fog brought by illness and medication, the result is even more uncertain.  In the case of Leonard Fife, the terminally ill documentary filmmaker who’s the subject of Paul Schrader’s film, an adaptation of Russell Banks’s final novel “Foregone” (2021), the remembering is made even more uncertain by the fact that it’s also intended as a confession to sins real or imagined.  In short, what Fife says represents the ramblings of a narrator who is unreliable to say the least, and a practiced liar at worst.

The set-up is identical with that in the book.  Fife (played in the present by Richard Gere, and in flashbacks mostly by Jacob Elordi, although at some points Gere takes his place), a celebrated maker of activist documentaries (the first on Agent Orange, and others on clerical sexual abuse and the illegal harvesting of seals) suffering from terminal cancer, who’s agreed to be interviewed by two of his former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill).  They’ve collaborated on documentary films together, and see the interview as a means of both cementing Fife’s reputation (making him, as one remarks, as central to Canada’s cultural history as pianist Glenn Gould) and enhancing their own as his legatees.

Fife’s participation has been only reluctantly agreed to by his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), who has also served as his producer, and his nurse Rene (Caroline Dhavernas), who has serious reservations about the impact the effort will have on his condition.  Even Fife at first questions why he accepted the invitation.  But once brought before the camera (equipped with a device like Errol Morris’ Interrotron, allowing eye contact between subject and cameraman), he’s determined to participate because his intention isn’t to give Malcolm what he wants (a sort of “greatest hits” account of his work), but a rambling admission of his many betrayals and lies, which taken together would demolish his status as a courageous draft resister during the Vietnam War, a committed family man and a dedicated documentary truth-teller.  It’s a confession directed to Emma, who he says deserves the truth as the only person who loves him.

It’s a disjointed, meandering process, interrupted by objections from Emma (who argues that Fife’s words are a confabulation of truth, fiction and mistaken memory) and Rene (who sees the effect it’s having on her patient).  There’s an additional problem in Malcolm’s sexy assistant Sloan (Penelope Mitchell), in whom Diana suspects Malcolm has a more than a mentor’s interest.  She also catches Leonard’s eye.

But the major difficulty is the story Fife is insistently blurting out—about a trip purportedly to Cuba fueled by a sleazy theft, two abandoned wives and a son he left behind, an escape to Canada that’s hardly the act of a dissident icon, a filmmaking career that began not through principle but accident—and so on.  Some of this, certainly, is already known to Emma—the abandoned son (Zach Shaffer) of his second wife Alicia (Kristine Froseth) had actually tracked him down, only to be rebuffed, and she’d commiserated with him—but other admissions, like the fact that he slept with Gloria, the partner of a painter friend (Jake Weary) shortly after hearing that Alicia had miscarried with their second child, are apparently surprises to her.

Schrader tells us all this, and more (like Fife’s brief first marriage), in a fractured style cinematically mirroring the protagonist’s confused mental state, shifting frame formats and switching from black-and-white to color.  He even has the cast double some roles—Thurman, for instance, plays Gloria in a black wig, and Mitchell assumes a second role as well.  The technical elements help to clarify the different timeframes involved, but not always (see the black-and-white induction physical episode, done in seriocomic fashion, which is at odds with the color, wide-screen format used in many past scenes), but much remains mystifying, like the time young Leonard apparently spent working for the pharmaceutical company owned by Alicia’s father (Peter Hans Benson) and uncle (Scott Jaeck), who offered him the position so that he wouldn’t take a teaching job up north and remove his wife from her southern home.

In short, nothing is made crystal clear, expect for the present-day interview segments, which end with an appalling trick by Malcolm that speaks to the unsavory methods of filmmakers generally.  But Schrader and his colleagues—cinematographer Andrew Wonder and editor Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.—achieve the measured, almost unworldly atmosphere they’re after.  Adding to it are the soft-toned, quasi-folksy songs by Phosphorescent (Matthew Houck) that serve as the soundtrack.  Production and costume design (Deborah Jensen and Aubrey Laufer, respectively) are excellent.

As to the performances, Gere, who worked with Schrader as long ago as “American Gigolo,” tries very hard to play old and infirm, but the turn merely seems calculated, while Elordi is smoothly efficient as the younger version, although the lack of physical similarity is a problem.  The rest are more adequate than remarkable.

This is the second adaptation of a Banks novel Schrader has made. The first, “Affliction” (1997) also dealt with the burden of memory, but it did so in a more direct fashion, and was more powerful for it.  In “Oh, Canada” (a title Banks is supposed to have preferred to his own), the fragmentation, while true to the novel, frankly works against the overall impact, making for a remoteness than impedes emotional involvement.  While one can admire the stylistic fidelity Schrader shows toward the source, the effect is more cerebral than visceral.  And while one can appreciate the point being made about the fragility and malleability of memory, in the end it seems simply posited rather than effectively dramatized.     

Now Showing

THE RETURN

Producers: Uberto Pasolini, James Clayton, Roberto Sessa, Kostantinos Kontovrakis and Paolo del Brocco    Director: Uberto Pasolini   Screenplay: Edward Bond, John Collee and Uberto Pasolini   Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer, Marwan Kenzari, Claudio Santamaria, Ángela Molina, Tom Rhys Harries, Nikitas Tsakiroglou, Jamie Andrew Cutler, Moe Bar-El, Amir Wilson, Jaz Hutchins, Hugh Quarshie, Chris Corrigan, Aaron Cobham and Amesh Edireweera   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B

The old adage is that even Homer nods, but the ponderous pacing of “The Return,” Uberto Pasolini’s revisionist take on the ending of “The Odyssey,” might just make some viewers nod off instead.  If you can tune in to the film’s somber wavelength, however, you will appreciate it as a thoughtful reflection on the traumatic toll war inevitably takes on even the most hardened and celebrated of soldiers.

The two great Greek epics ascribed to Homer, the “Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” tell the tale—in part at least—of the legendary Trojan War.  In the latter work Odysseus, the clever king of the island of Ithaca who conceived the stratagem of the Trojan horse, goes through a long series of adventures trying to get back home to his patient wife Penelope and young son Telemachus.  Once back, he must contend with the many suitors who have congregated to demand Penelope to choose one of them as her new husband, eventually killing them all with Telemachus’ help and reclaiming his throne.

The script for “The Return,” by Edward Bond, John Collee and Pasolini, jettisons all of Homer’s references to divine intervention and ignores the ten-year string of trials that prevented Odysseus from reaching Ithaca after Troy’s fall.  Instead, it begins with Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washing up naked on the island’s shore, taken in and tended by the faithful swineherd Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria), who does not recognize his old master.  (Initially, as in Homer, only Odysseus’ old hunting dog Argos does; the animal then promptly dies.)

Meanwhile Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) suffers humiliation at the hands of the suitors led by preening Pisander (Tom Rhys Harries) and quietly threatening Antinous (Marwan Kenzari), and Penelope (Juliette Binoche) tends to her weaving, preparing a funeral shawl for her addled father-in-law Laertes (Nikitas Tsakiroglou).  She promises to choose a new husband after completing it but prolongs the process by undoing each night what she’s woven during the day, hoping for her husband’s appearance before the deception is discovered.     

This Odysseus is not Homer’s hero.  He’s a broken man, haunted by all the men who ventured with him on the expedition twenty years earlier and perished while he survived, and unable to forget the horrors of battle and everything he’s suffered since the end of combat.  At one point he muses that for some soldiers, war becomes home, a place they’re forced to remain in even after the carnage is over.  He embodies the traumatic effect of war on its participants and the struggle to adjust to “normalcy” that poses intractable obstacles.  It’s a subject “The Return” shares with “The Best Years of Our Lives,” though the times and circumstances of the two films are profoundly different.

Fiennes gives an impressive performance as a man in anguish over what he’s become, wondering whether he’s worthy of the wife he left behind or of the son who hopes for his father’s return on the one hand but is angry over his absence on the other, a boy torn between wanting to confront the suitors and begging his mother to choose one of them.  He also proves physically convincing when Odysseus eventually decides to shed his beggars’ clothing and stand up to the men ravaging his realm—the narrative retains the challenge Penelope sets down for the suitors to string her husband’s bow and successfully shoot an arrow through a gauntlet of axes—and mow them down. Plummer, on the other hand, has some difficulty with the abrupt changes in his character’s attitudes, understandably since the screenplay doesn’t really manage to explain them adequately.  (When he decides to leave Ithaca at the close, as his father explains, “to find himself,” you might agree that it’s a goal that might apply to both Telemachus and the actor playing him.) 

The two do combine, though, in a rousing closing bloodbath that, as staged by Pasolini and cinematographer Marius Panduru and edited by David Charap, should go some way to satisfy those disappointed by the absence of CGI monsters, gods and goddesses.  Binoche, meanwhile, projects the steadfastness of Penelope though Pasolini’s solemn approach doesn’t allow for much emotional demonstrativeness on her part; she demonstrates the character’s steeliness mostly through the glare of her eyes.

As for the rest, Santamaria makes a strapping Eumaeus, while Ángela Molina has some telling moments as Eurycleia, the elderly nurse who recognizes Odysseus from an old scar, as does Tsakiroglou as the doddering “old king” for whom Penelope is weaving that funeral shawl.  Among the suitors Tom Rhys Harries has little trouble embodying the pugnacious Pisander, but like Plummer Kenzari has some bringing Antinous into focus.  On the one hand his smooth, oily pursuit of Penelope possesses understated menace (and, as some of his colleagues suggest, real desire), but his abrupt changes of attitude about Telemachus, at one point protecting him as a means of persuading Penelope to accept his suit and then suddenly advocating for his murder, seem arbitrary.

One thing that truly stands out in “The Return,” however, is the starkness of the settings, as designed by Giuliano Pannuti and shot by Panduru on striking locations in Corfu, the Peloponnesus and Italy.  As befits Pasolini’s take on the material, Rachel Portman contributes a mostly mournful score, which nonetheless perks up during the action scenes.

There will be those who regret that “The Return” doesn’t tackle “The Odyssey” in all its mythological glory, but previous attempts to do so, on screens big and small, have been pretty dismal.  This film offers a revisionist take on Odysseus’ fabled homecoming that possesses universal resonance, and, propelled by a powerful performance from Fiennes, proves both intelligent and moving.  But appreciating it does require a viewer’s patience.