In his tender memoir, “The Film Club,” out-of-work Canadian film critic David Gilmour feels his 15-year-old son Jesse against the very tips of his fingers. Here, Gilmour coaches, inveigles and scolds Jesse into finish some homework. Then he describes the results. His son has completely tuned out. “It was a kind of boredom, yes, but a rarefied kind, an exquisite, almost cellular conviction of the irrelevance of the task at hand. And for some odd reason, for those few seconds, I was experiencing it as if it was occurring in my own body. Oh, I though, so this is how he’s going through his school day. Against this, you cannot win—and suddenly—it was as unmistakable as the sound of a breaking window—I understood that we had lost the school battle. I also knew in the same instant—knew it in my blood—that I was going to lose him over this stuff.”
Gilmour’s own career is in an anxiety-provoking lull. He worries about money, about having an impact on the culture and about his own future. Fully in midlife, he has no clear idea himself on what makes a successful man. Full of love and desperation, Gilmour strikes a very unconventional deal with Jesse. He allows his son to drop out of high school—not forcing him to work and not forcing him to pay rent—on the condition that he watch three movies a week with the old man.
A less honest writer might have rendered the education of Jesse Gilmore as an idiosyncratic, artistically highbrow but comfortingly cozy home-schooling arrangement. Gilmour doesn’t stoop. For years, he writes, his oddball curriculum doesn’t seem to be having much impact at all. Here he describes living with a directionless teen: “Some days I felt like I was beating back chaos and disorder and irresponsibility with a whip and a chair. Indeed, it seemed as if there was a jungle growing all around the house, that it was constantly threatening to poke its branches and vines through the windows, under the door and up the basement. More than a year had passed since Jesse had left school … and there was no sign of him charging up the stairs to take the world ‘by the lapels’.”
But they plow on. They analyze Kurosawa, Scorsese and Truffaut. They look at manhood through the movies of Gary Cooper, Richard Gere and Christopher Walken. They talk, talk, talk—about their lives, whether cinematographer Sven Nykvist did better work for Ingmar Bergman or Woody Allen, about letting themselves be drawn in (or not) by the magic of film and, of course, about the intoxication of love. “I knew I wasn’t giving him a systematic education in cinema. That wasn’t the point. We could as easily have gone skin-diving or collected stamps. The films simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as door-openers for all manner of conversational topics—Rebecca [Jesse’s girlfriend] … dental floss, Vietnam, impotence, cigarettes.” The conclusion of the book is almost as random. Along the way, what emerges is something special for Jesse and David. What emerges for the reader is a beautiful, unvarnished portrait of fathers and sons—irregular, flawed, full of heartbreak and heart.
