Popcorn reading

The Film Club

By David Gilmour

225 pages

Available at National Book Stores

Sometime ago, Canadian novelist and film reviewer David Gilmour was having trouble with his teenage son who wanted to quit high school. Rather than lecture the kid or threaten to throw him out of the house, Gilmour improvised a solution that only a guy would ever think up: he told his son Jesse that he could quit school and live at home for free, under one condition: that he watch at least three movies a week in the company of his dad.

The Film Club, Gilmour’s memoir of that strange three-year experiment, is a ridiculously entertaining read — though it’s surely not the soundest parenting guide in the world. Not only does it come with interesting lists of movies to watch and lively discussion about what makes them great (or not), it explores a relationship between a father and son that is unlikely to get made into a Hollywood movie. Instead of warm, pithy platitudes about embracing life, it’s mostly a search for a light in the wilderness, both for Jesse and his dad. It’s more Tuesdays with Roger Ebert than Tuesdays with Morrie.

To be fair, the divorced Gilmour doesn’t hold himself up as a shining beacon of good parenting. The idea to drop out of school and watch videos together is a bit cracked, but it’s probably better than drinking beer on the sofa and watching hockey games together. At least Jesse emerges after three years with a passable knowledge of film history, including genres, directors, actors and cinematographers.

Secondly, for a parent trying to set an example, there is an awful lot of drinking in this book, almost as much as an episode of Battlestar Gallactica. Gilmour takes his son out drinking during a trip to Cuba, and allows drinking in the house most nights. He is remarkably reasonable even when his 16-year-old son goes on a cocaine binge (after getting his head messed up by a drop-dead Vietnamese vixen named Rebecca Ng), simply telling him not to do the drug again, because the comedown will make him feel “very depressed.”

In short, he’s not Ozzie Harriet. But Gilmour clearly loves his son, cares about his future deeply, and wants him to be happy.

So he starts by showing him Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, trying to encourage Jesse to see parallels between the truant kid’s plight and his own life.

“Okay, let me ask you again,” I said. “Do you see anything in common with Antoine’s situation and yours?”

Jesse grinned. “You mean what am I going to do now that I don’t have to go to school?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, maybe that’s why the kid looks worried in the last frame of the movie. He doesn’t know either,” I said.

After a moment he said, “When I was in school, I worried about getting bad marks and getting in trouble. Now that I’m not in school, I worry that maybe I’ve ruined my life.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“How is it good?”

“It means you’re not going to relax into a bad life.”

Then he follows it with that sublime specimen of movie trash, Basic Instinct (“it’s not just a film about sleaze, but by sleazy people”). Naturally, they spend more time talking about Sharon Stone than Truffaut.

There’s a refreshing randomness to Gilmour’s film choices. He screens film “units” — mini-festivals that focus on “Buried Treasures,” “Guilty Pleasures,” and “Stillness” (movies where the actors steal scenes by remaining perfectly still, like Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando or Richard Gere). But mostly he just goes by instinct, mixing art with trash, his selections based on his own mood or whatever crisis Jesse is going through. Gilmour may come off as a bit self-important at times (what teenager wants to watch Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God?), but at least he doesn’t break his chapters down into neat little “life lessons,” bracketed by egg-headed film discussion. That makes The Film Club more bearable — and truthful — than a book like this might be.

Jesse’s troubles are not limited to school; he also has his heart broken by several girls, and even dad’s film fests can’t make that go away. The son’s problems lead Gilmour to reflect on his own life, his own failed relationships, his stalled career (a gig as a Canadian TV host has just ended) and his own qualifications to give advice. In short, he’s as mixed up and confused as Jesse, but Gilmour does have the advantage of age: he knows that, in time, things will look better.

Meanwhile, there’s all this entertaining coach-potato analysis about the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (“They had the extraordinary quality of making you feel as if, in spite of their hysterical popularity, you alone understood how great they were, that they were somehow your own private discovery”), a movie that Jesse simply finds “dreadful” (leading us to wonder, can the Beatles survive the Gen-X generation gap?). Gilmour does a long prologue before showing Giant, James Dean’s last film, urging Jesse to pay attention to the way Dean steals a scene by simply twirling a lasso and mumbling at the ground. He discusses how music can lift a movie to inexplicable heights — how Wong Kar Wai’s use of The Mamas and the Papas’ California Dreamin’ in Chungking Express makes the song sound fresher and more alive than it ever did in the ‘60s. He sniffs out “Buried Treasures,” things that didn’t get watched enough like Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (paying special attention to young Steve Zahn who “almost steals the movie”), or Michael Mann’s Thief. He praises Tony Scott’s True Romance as “an almost unbearably watchable film, a treat you should let yourself see only twice a year,” but is just as enthusiastic in discussing “Guilty Pleasures,” such as Showgirls (“I brought his attention to a scene where Elizabeth Berkley pulls a switchblade on a cab driver, a very special bit of bad acting.”)

Mostly, Gilmour is a gifted collector of “movie moments” — those great film images and bits of dialogue that we file away in our memories, and chronicler of how these things actually come to shape the way we see the world.

Handily, The Film Club also works as a “list” book (there’s a filmography of all the movies mentioned or discussed in the back). Gilmour has written a hit book because he understood something that remains true even in our age of endless technological distractions: discussing a movie — sharing with someone else what makes it great or horrible — can actually be as entertaining as watching the movie itself.