written by Russell Banks
Scenario
Leonard Fife, one of the sixty thousand draft dodgers and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid service in Vietnam, shares all his secrets with a demythologizing of his mythologized life. This is the second time that Paul Schrader has directed one of Banks’ novels for the screen, following his adaptation of Affliction (1997). Reference in the Film Junk Podcast: Episode 961: In Violent Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Richard Gere is a renowned maker of hard-hitting, gritty documentaries. He works with his wife and producer Uma Thurman.
There may be autobiographical points to this film
Many 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 about the protests, and interpreting this film under the supervision of his producer and his wife, Uma Thurman. Some critics have called it “autobiographical.” because they’re so intellectually lazy that they don’t bother to think more than one way before they give up. The film is certainly Schraeder’s own opinion, not, say, a pandemonium or a large chunk of rock scraped from the Laurentian Shield into the Long Island end moraine. I don’t think that makes it autobiographical, any more than the guy is a filmmaker.
There are filmmakers and filmmakers
Despite Gere and the people who make the film within the film wanting to make a sensational film at any cost, Miss Thurman’s only desire is to protect her husband, even though she already knows the worst. She considered it a meditation on filmmaking. It certainly has its aspects. A filmmaker shoots far more footage than he needs and edits it into a final form that may or may not have any connection to reality or the filmmaker’s original intentions. As Gere dies on camera and throughout the film, the events of his life that he wants to tell appear confused and misdirected, mixed and jumbled together.
Schraeder, on the other hand, seems outraged, full of despair, and leaves the hapless survivors to make a mess
To understand this, to make a film about it—since the guys in the film already have contracts to sell the film—you’ll need an editor. But more central to understanding this film is to see that, as in other Schraeder works, it’s also primarily about outrage. His work is similar in some ways to the work of Ingmar Bergman: he was raised religious, and he was musing on human fallibility in a world without a God to provide an objective framework for good and evil: incomprehension and disappointment, leaving it to the audience to work out how to do it. moral system. Gere leaves the filmmakers to make sense of his interview, and Miss Thurman to clean up her life and the lies.
And it’s not Schraeder’s
It’s not Gere’s problem: he’s dead. Anyway, these are a couple of ways to watch the movie that I’ve come up with. If you see the movie, despite the lack of explosions or good jokes, let me know if it makes sense. And if you have different interpretations.