NONFICTION
Films provide grist for an education
By Christopher Schobert
NEWS BOOK REVIEWER
Updated: 05/04/08 6:47 AM
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- David Gilmour chose the coming-of-age film “The 400 Blows,” seen above, as the first film to share with his dropout son.
If you are a true film obsessive — say, one who can recognize the voices of Brian DePalma, Werner Herzog, or even Jennifer Jason Leigh, sight unseen — you might be moved to tears, or at least, more movie-watching, by David Gilmour’s wry, wondrous memoir, “The Film Club.” If movies mean little to you? Well, I’m not sure how you live, but you’ll enjoy the text, too, so keenly observed and delightfully drawn is its story of a troubled father and a troubled son, and how cinema saves them.
Gilmour was a popular Toronto television broadcaster and film critic before losing his TV job and finding himself a tad adrift, looking for steady writing work. It was at this time that his son, Jesse, derailed at school. His grades plummeted, his level of interest dissipated, and he was far more interested in smoking cigarettes, working on his rap lyrics and chasing girls. His old man was worried, and did something that parents must do every so often, risky as it may be — he trusted his instincts. And his gut told him to tell Jesse this, following the teen’s decision to drop out: “I want you to watch three movies a week with me. I pick them. It’s the only education you’re going to get.”
Jesse responds as most of us would: “You’re kidding.”
No, Gilmour was not, and he understands why the reader might now undergo a level of severe eye-rolling unseen since the first screening of “Pay it Forward.” “What if I’m wrong?” Gilmour wonders. “What if I’m being hip at the expense of my son and letting him ruin his life?” Jesse, his father theorizes, feels a deep connection to cinema. “He doesn’t read; he loathes sports. What does he like to do? He likes to watch movies. So did I.”
And so it begins, this “Film Club” for father and son. Gilmour put together a nicely eclectic mix of the high-and low-brow, the known and the obscure. First came perhaps the finest coming-of-age film ever made, Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows.” Gilmour explained to Jesse the genesis of the project — Truffaut’s high school dropout years, his sneaking into Paris cinema houses, his eventual job writing film criticism, and his casting of the great Jean-Pierre Leaud. Like the strong film writer he is, Gilmour describes the great closing freeze-frame of young Antoine with a poet’s eye for detail (SPOILER ALERT!): “We went all the way to the end, that long scene where Antoine runs away from reform school; he runs through fields, past farmhouses, through apple groves, until he arrives at the dazzling ocean. Such immensity! It seems to stretch out forever. He goes down a bank of wooden steps; he advances across the sand and there, just where the waves start in, he pulls back slightly and looks into the camera; the film freezes; the movie’s over.”
“What did you think?” Gilmour asks. “A bit boring,” says Jesse.
So, he finds, discovering what works for Jesse isn’t necessarily going to be easy. But that becomes part of the fun — what films will he like? Which will he dismiss out of hand? Some are rather easy to predict (“Basic Instinct,” Paul Verhoeven’s trash, legs-uncrossed masterpiece; “You have to admit it dad — this is a great film”). Some are a little surprising, like Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chungking Express,” a work of such romantic bliss that it destroys the broken-hearted teenager to no end.
Gilmour defends guilty pleasures like “Ishtar,” explains the liberal use of the F-word in “The Last Detail,” and, oh yeah, helps save his son’s life. As the club carries on, Jesse has his ups and downs, as does his father, for that matter, but in the end, both emerge better men than they were before. And the movies have a heckuva lot to do with it.
I wonder if Gilmour, as he was writing, thought about the plight of the modern film critic — the forced resignations of many movie-writing-masters, the rise of substandard Internet journalism (there is some very, very good film criticism on the Net, too, but a great amount of low-IQ bile), the rising tide of anti-critic bias. In a sense, Gilmour’s “Film Club” makes a finer argument than any I’ve read for the importance of having a helping hand when it comes to making your Netflix/Blockbuster decision.
There’s a fine example right from Gilmour’s text, of a day he ran into an old friend on Yonge Street. They decided to see a movie together, on the spot, and the friend pointed at one in particular. “You got to see this one,” he said. “You just have to.” The film is a surprising choice — Tony Scott’s hyper-kinetic
“True Romance,” based on an early Tarantino script. It’s funny Gilmour mentioned this, as it’s a film that people often tell me is one they can’t get enough of. Gilmour calls it “a treat you should let yourself see only twice a year,” to keep it fresh. That is the kind of wisdom that can only come from a true film critic.
As “The Film Club” came to a close, I realized several things. One, I had read the book in a matter of hours, which for an aging, lazy, over-pop-culture-caffeinated narcissist like me, ain’t that easy anymore. I also found that I had become completely enraptured by David and Jesse, to the point that I found myself pondering their futures, and the role these experiences would have in them.
And, of course, I thought of the movies. That, I believe, is the praise that would make David and Jesse Gilmour the happiest of all.
The Film Club By David Gilmour Twelve Books 256 pages, $22
Christopher Schobert is a local freelance critic.
