If Anything, 'Oh, Canada' Will Send You Down a Draft Dodgers' Rabbit Hole

In Paul Schrader's buzzy new film, Oh, Canada, currently premiering at New York Film Festival, audiences spend an hour and thirty-five minutes getting acquainted with Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), the fictional protagonist in the 2021 novel, Foregone, written by Schrader's longtime (now-deceased) friend, Russell Banks. Fife, we learn, is a famous documentary filmmaker confronting all kinds of regrets at the end of his life, including the abandonment of multiple women and his two children. You suspect you're supposed to consider him to be a complex character, but by the film's conclusion, he just seems like an unsympathetic piece of shit—quite the feat, considering he's suffering from terminal cancer.

According to Oh, Canada's synopsis, Fife is "intent on revealing his long-guarded secrets and demystifying his mythologized life" during one final TV interview conducted by former students. He insists his wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), be there to hear what he says. But the central secret isn't that Fife fathered two children and left their respective mothers without a word. Emma, we learn, already knew about at least one of the children from her own investigation. Instead, he admits to fleeing to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. The end. However, it's not what he did, but how he did it that ultimately feels like the more significant revelation—at least, to me. In short: Fife feigned homosexuality and mental instability.

In the film's final act, a young Fife (Jacob Elordi) reports for military assessment donning a jockstrap bedecked with pro-peace, anti-war doodles and doing...what's that? Oh, nothing. Just a deeply homophobic impression of a gay man—limp wrist, and all. Then, during the interview portion of his assessment, Elordi takes the act a step further and begins speaking erratically and repeating himself as if borrowing from a caricature of a person who would've been lobotomized—or worse—a decade earlier.

The scene forces a number of galling things about this man's life into focus. For starters, the older—supposedly regretful—Fife doesn't seem half as remorseful of dodging two different women, both of whom he procreated with, as he is of dodging...a war. And, more disturbingly, it's difficult to tell for sure if he's even that remorseful about cosplaying as a stereotypical gay man to do so. Despite the fact that feigning homosexuality to dodge the draft is an intriguing, and historically accurate, plot point, the film hardly lingers on that fact at all apart from Elordi's brief, and—hopefully—purposefully offensive portrayal.

Questioning men about their sexual identity at induction centers began during World War II, according to historians. Since homosexuality was still criminalized during the Vietnam War, in many cases, men who exhibited "homosexual tendencies" were immediately disqualified from military service—thus, a number of heterosexual men did as Fife did to avoid serving, as detailed in Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II. Because so many heterosexual men adopted this stereotypical effeminacy, it eventually became so difficult for recruiters to tell who was actually gay that evidence of such—arrest records or letters from doctors or psychiatrists—was required to prove it.

"As a consequence of such requirements, homosexual men were sometimes disbelieved and drafted, while heterosexual men able to obtain the appropriate letters or mimic homosexual stereotypes were deferred," historian Justin David Suran wrote in Coming out against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam.

Now, far be it from me to criticize anyone who refuses to participate in the American war machine, but I do think it would've garnered a bit more understanding had any historical context been presented. Of course, some lamentation from Fife over faking being gay would've been great, too.

Again, Elordi's portrayal of the young Fife—especially during this scene—wasn't any more successful in establishing empathy. In fact, I've never seen a straight man feigning queerness look quite so...wooden. This is the same adjective I'd use to describe his overall performance. Even when he's receiving a handjob earlier in the film, Elordi reads bored somehow. Beautiful, but borderline dissociative. The fact that the only thing this film prompted me to do was spend multiple hours researching draft dodgers should tell you everything you need to know.

Oh, well. There is, however, a new Schrader crotch shot to gawk at. That's right, the director—who memorably gave audiences an eyeful of Gere in American Gigolo—included a lingering frame on Elordi's jockstrap. I guess, that's one win for the queers here.