24/25
Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft dodgers and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, shares all his secrets to de-mythologize his mythologized life.. Based on the novel 'Foregone' ; by Russell Banks. This is the second time Paul Schrader has directed one of Banks' of the novel for the screen, following his adaptation of Aflicción (1997).. Featured in the podcast Film Junk: Episode 961: In a Violent Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Richard Gere is a respected creator of gritty, dirty documentaries. He works with his wife and producer Uma Thurman. Years ago he fled the United States to protest the Vietnam War. It is now 2023, he is dying, and several of his students are making a documentary, interviewing him during protests and under the watchful eye of his producer and wife, Uma Thurman. Schrader is a careful writer, and there are several ways to interpret this film. Some critics have called it "autobiographical" because they are so intellectually lazy that they can’t be bothered to think more than one thought before giving up. This film may have autobiographical points. Certainly the film reflects Schraeder’s opinions, not, say, the opinions of a panda bear, or the opinions of a large boulder scraped from the Laurentian Shield into the terminal moraine of Long Island. I believe that does not make it autobiographical, nor does the fact that the guy is a director. There are filmmakers and there are filmmakers. Although Gere and the people who make the movie-within-a-movie want to make a sensational film no matter the cost, Miss Thurman’s only desire is to protect her husband, even though she already knows the worst. he wondered if this was a meditation on the making of the movie itself. It certainly has aspects of that. Director will shoot many more footage than he needs, and edit it into a final form that may or may not bear any relation to reality or the director’s original intentions. As Gere dies on camera and during the film, the events of his life that he wants to tell emerge confusingly and awkwardly, mixing and confabulating with each other. For it to make sense, for it to be made into a film about it — because the guys in the film they already have a deal to sell the film — they’ll need an editor. That’s the real job of any storyteller: to arrange the events and characters within a story so that it makes sense to the audience, primarily dealing with anger. In some ways, his work is reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s: Raised religiously, he reflected on human error in a world without a G-d to provide an objective framework of right and wrong: confusion and disappointment, leaving the audience to wonder how to resolve this system of morality. Schraeder, on the other hand, seems furious, filled with despair, and abandons the chaos to the unfortunate survivors to clean him up. Gere leaves it to the filmmakers to make sense of his interview, and to Ms. Thurman to clean up the mess and lies he made of his life. It’s not Gere’s problem: he’s dead. And it’s not Schraeder’s. Anyway, those are a few ways of looking at the film that I’ve come up with. If you see the film, despite the fact that there are no explosions or good jokes, let me know if they make sense to you. And if you have different interpretations, too.