Private screenings
Looking for a language to share with his son, a father finds it at the movies
The Film Club
By David Gilmour
Twelve, 225 pp., $21.99
In "The Film Club," the Canadian author and occasional movie critic David Gilmour commemorates the three years he spent mostly out of work sitting on a sofa watching films with his high-school-dropout son. Some might call this sloth. Gilmour prefers to call it parenting.
Oddly, he makes his case. The author, like many of us, is wise in the ways of pop culture yet clueless about the people in his own house. "Rosemary's Baby" he can address with depth and ease; less so the adolescent boy "sitting head down on the other side of the kitchen table." Because Gilmour knows this, "The Film Club" is as much about what his son, Jesse, revealed to him as what he taught Jesse during their high-minded couch-potato sessions.
The boy is 16 when the book opens, smart but profoundly uninterested in school, dabbling in vandalism and courting the abyss. Gilmour, divorced and remarried, switches houses with his ex-wife and offers the kid a deal: You can drop out and you won't have to work, but the two of us will have to watch three movies a week and talk about them. The first is François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows." Great film, but the average 16-year-old might be forgiven for wanting to renegotiate the contract.
Indeed, Jesse finds the French New Wave classic "a bit boring," even as Gilmour gently pushes the boy to seek parallels between Antoine Doinel's adolescent anxieties and his own. Later, there's an ugly scene over "A Hard Day's Night," a movie whose magic completely eludes Jesse. He calls Lennon "a totally embarrassing man." Heresy!
Thus, the drama of "The Film Club" - and a sizable chunk of its comedy - is that of a father and son carving out mutual space between boomer complacency and teenage certainty. Give is required on both sides, but Dad's secret plan is that no matter how many movies you watch or how good they are (or bad - Gilmour pops in "Showgirls" at one point), you always end up talking about life.
"On the Waterfront" leads into a little lecture on director Elia Kazan and why ratting out your friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee is bad. "Mean Streets" offers a consideration on the ecstasies of being young and in love with life, a girl, and a movie camera. The Clint Eastwood shoot-'em-up "Magnum Force," strangely, becomes an apology from father to son for looming too psychically large.
And, always, the conversations circle back to women, because Jesse is young, and his father is a guy. A pair of the boy's troublesome romances take up many, many pages of "The Film Club," and a reader will probably decide that two consecutive bouts of wailing teenage masochism are one too many. Gilmour implies that measureless turns on the wheel of romantic karma are necessary before women are even slightly understood, but the suspicion remains that he's living vicariously.
Still, the movies pile up, and there's pleasure in watching Gilmour, chatty and knowing, connect them to the business at hand. He and Jesse share a horror festival ("Rosemary's Baby," "Psycho," "Onibaba," "The Exorcist") and dabble in mini-curriculums called "Buried Treasures" ("Quiz Show," "The Last Detail," "The Friends of Eddie Coyle") and "Guilty Pleasures" ("Rocky III," "La Femme Nikita"). Of the latter grouping, the author writes, with great good sense, "I wanted to steer Jesse away from the vulgarity of not being able to have a good time at a cheesy movie."
The "Stillness Unit" - films about men of poise - consists of "High Noon," "Internal Affairs," "The Dead Zone," "The Godfather Part II," "Bullitt," "Le Samourai," and "A Fistful of Dollars," and again one realizes how very male this book is. For someone like myself, who has daughters and has written of turning them on to the movies I love, reading "The Film Club" felt like visiting a foreign country where the signposts are the same but the destinations are unexpectedly different.
For many dads, too, this book may be one of those mirrors that reflect more than they'd like. All books about parenting - fathering in particular, I suspect - are monstrously egocentric at heart. They all point to the kid and crow what a good job Dad did. On some level, "The Film Club" tries to extend a patriarch's delusions of grandeur into his child's adolescence, when the statues are supposed to be pulled down. Gilmour risks playing the fool - the permissive parent who needs to be a pal, the pop pedagogue with a remote in his hand.
Yet parents also give their children keys to the world in the only language they know. In one passage, Gilmour tells his son about those exquisite movie moments that stop the world in its tracks - Marlon Brando with the glove in "On the Waterfront"; Audrey Hepburn softly saying "Hi" on the fire escape in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" - and what he's really telling his son is to seek such moments in life.
By the end of "The Film Club," a visibly together Jesse has moved into his own apartment and his own life, but not before locating his own primal scene. The film is "The Shining," and the moment is when a haunted Jack Nicholson, late in the game, tells his young boy that Dad can't go to sleep because he's just "got too much to do." "That's it," Jesse tells his father in a hushed voice. "Can we play it again?"
The scene's about a father planning to murder his own son. If Gilmour picks up on any irony there, he doesn't pass it along to us.
Ty Burr is a film critic for the Globe and the author of "The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together."
