Oh, Canada (2024) on Netflix
Leonard Fife, a filmmaker dying of cancer in Montreal, agrees to a last interview with two former students. He means to use it to tell the truth about himself.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.6/103,173 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Trailer
Plot summary
Canadian progressives revere Leonard "Leo" Fife, whose muckraking documentaries and the legend of his flight from the American draft made him a hero. He is dying of cancer in Montreal, where two former students, Malcolm and Diana, come to film a CBC documentary about his career. Malcolm says he is making an admiring retrospective. Leo has told many lies to the public and abandoned women, and he treats the interview as a chance to admit his sins to Emma, his wife and another former student of his. Malcolm wants to focus on the films, but Leo says he fell into filmmaking by accident and keeps returning to memories of his early life, his time in Virginia as an aspiring novelist with his pregnant wife Alicia and their son Cornel.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Oh, Canada (2024)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Robert De Niro turned down the lead in Oh, Canada because the salary was too low, and Paul Schrader cast Jacob Elordi as the young Leo after his casting director showed him Elordi's scenes in Euphoria.
- Paul Schrader decided to make a film about mortality after contracting long COVID and being hospitalized three times, and adapted his friend Russell Banks' novel Foregone after Banks fell ill with cancer; Banks asked him to title the film Oh, Canada.
- Cinematographer Andrew Wonder shot Oh, Canada in four styles for its four time periods: the present-day interview in dark color, Leo's trip to Canada blown out, his memories in black and white, and Cornel's visit in Bergman-esque orange after Cries and Whispers.
- Schrader wrote and shot a new epilogue in which Emma and Cornel visit the ossuary housing Leo's ashes; he screened it at Cannes but eventually cut it.
SPOILER
Schrader made Leo more unsympathetic than in Russell Banks' novel and, with Banks' approval, added a moment where Leo turns his back on his own son, likening it to his own falling-out with his brother.- A school on Long Island doubled as Leo's home in Montreal, and the film's Vermont scenes were shot in Dutchess County and Queens.
