33/25
Leonard Fife, one of the sixty thousand draft dodgers and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, shares all his secrets to demystify his mythologized life. Based on the novel “Foregone” by Russell Banks. This is Paul Schrader’s second time directing one of Banks’ novels for film, following his adaptation of Aflicción (1997).. Featured in Film Junk Podcast: Episode 961: In a Violent Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Richard Gere is a respected filmmaker of powerful and devastating documentaries. He works with his wife and producer, Uma Thurman. Many years ago, he fled the United States to protest the Vietnam War. It’s now 2023, he’s dying, and several of his students are making a documentary, interviewing him during the protests and under the watchful eye of his producer and wife, Uma Schrader is a careful writer, and there are several ways to interpret this film. Some critics have called it “autobiographical” because they’re so intellectually lazy that they can’t be bothered to think more than one thought before giving up. There may be autobiographical points in this film. Sure, the film reflects Schraeder’s views, rather than, say, those of a panda or a big chunk of rock scraped off the Laurentian Shield in the terminal moraine of Long Island. That, I don’t think, makes it autobiographical, any more than the fact that the guy is a filmmaker. There are filmmakers and filmmakers. Even though Gere and the people who make the movie within the movie want to make a sensational movie at any cost, Miss Thurman’s only wish is to protect her husband, even though she has already known the worst. was a meditation on filmmaking itself. It certainly has aspects of that. A filmmaker will shoot many more feet of film than he needs and edit it into a final form that may or may not have anything to do with reality or the filmmaker’s original intentions. As Gere dies on camera and in the course of the film, the events of his life that he wants to tell appear confused and accidental, blurring and blurring. To make sense of this, to make a movie out of it—because the guys in the movie already have a contract to sell the movie—will require an editor. That’s the real job of any storyteller: to organize the events and the characters into a story, in such a way that it makes sense to the audience. But the most important thing to understand this film is to see that, like others in Schraeder’s oeuvre, it is primarily concerned with outrage. In some ways, his work resembles that of Ingmar Bergman: raised religiously, he pondered human fallibility in a godless world to propose an objective framework of good and evil: bewilderment and disappointment, leaving the audience to wonder how to resolve the problem. a system of morality. Schraeder, by contrast, seems outraged, filled with despair, and leaving the mess to be cleaned up by the unfortunate survivors. Gere lets the filmmakers make sense of his interview and Miss Thurman clean up the mess and lies he made of her life. That’s not Gere’s problem: he’s dead. And it’s not Schraeder’s. Anyway, these are some of the ways I’ve come up with of seeing the film. If you see the movie, even if there are no explosions or good jokes, let me know if it makes sense to you. And if you have different interpretations too.
