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The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son

by David Gilmour

Thomas Allen Publishers

(paperback), $18.95

I see David Gilmour in our neighbourhood a lot. If we make eye contact, there’ll be a brief second of a “Do I know you?” look, probably from crossing paths for many years. But we’ve never met*, and until recently, I’d never read any of his books. Oh, sure, I knew him from TV, as the CBC’s film critic or his show, Gilmour on the Arts, but his books have always seemed meant for another kind of reader.

But when I heard about his most recent book, The Film Club, I picked it up and handed it to Larry, because it dealt with Gilmour’s relationship with his teen-aged son Jesse after Gilmour and his ex-wife agreed to allow him to drop out of high school. High school is a long way away for our son Oliver, and I hope we never have to contemplate whether he should leave school prematurely (and I also hope we’re still married when Oliver reaches high school and beyond). But I thought the idea of dealing with the issue and Gilmour’s unorthodox response might provide a useful father’s-eye view to the roller-coaster ride of adolescence that awaits us. Larry said he enjoyed the book but didn’t feel compelled to write a review, so the book languished on a shelf for a couple of months. Gilmour was nominated – and won – some prizes for the book and then it was reviewed positively in The New York Times Book Review, one of the biggest boosters to book sales. Okay, I thought, let me have a look at it before Oprah weighs in.

Recently packing for a weekend trip to Montreal, I scoped around for a good read and thought The Film Club might make the cut after a night-before test run. I had to force myself to put it away around the 100-page mark so that I could get a few hours’ sleep and have a decent chunk to read for the weekend itself. Of course, there’s no guarantee that reading will be possible when travelling with a child, but we also packed our portable DVD player and Oliver had picked out his favourite Thomas disks, plus a few episodes of Dora and The Berenstain Bears thrown in for good measure. Larry packed Rawi Hage’s DeNiro’s Game, so we departed with high hopes for our reading and viewing pleasure.

Watching films is the setting, but it becomes quickly obvious that it isn’t the central story.Toronto to Montreal by train is about five hours, and after accounting for settling in, snacks and bathroom breaks, we hoped to persuade Oliver to stay seated for at least the length of time that Thomas and his friends get into and out of a scrape. After many previous driving experiences in eastern Ontario, I regarded that stretch of the 401 from just outside Toronto to about Cornwall to be the most boring drive imaginable, so Larry and I hoped to trade the driving for satisfying reading on the rails. As Oliver donned his headphones (unlike other others travelling with kids in nearby seats, we told Oliver that he had to wear headphones so that the volume wouldn’t add to the cacophony of Game Boys and cellphone conversations that pinged ceaselessly through the train), I returned to Gilmour’s three-year cinematic odyssey with his son.

Maybe Gilmour proposed the idea that they watch three movies a week together because he had been a professional film critic. Each film was introduced by a summary of the director, genre and, where possible, anecdotes of the filming, and sometimes Gilmour has to restrain himself from information overload before Jesse can judge the film – and perhaps his father – on his own terms. Watching films is the setting, but it becomes quickly obvious that it isn’t the central story.

At the time of his son’s academic withdrawal, Gilmour was also experiencing under- and unemployment. Many days stretched before him with no other agenda than to slide another DVD into the machine and reel off some trivia. So what could have become just time spent together became, to refresh a tired cliché, quality family time. Fairly early on, Gilmour realized it was a magical interlude that could never be duplicated or retrieved beyond the moment he was experiencing. No doubt he also realized he should start taking notes beyond the yellow index cards he affixed to the fridge to track the movies they’d seen.

David Gilmour (photo courtesy of David Gilmour)

Gilmour’s own awareness that this precious time warranted documenting felt like a gentle reminder to capture every moment in family. I looked up from the book to see what was happening with my own. When we checked in back at Union Station, the ticket clerk had given Oliver a gift bag which included a cardboard train that had to be folded. Larry was given that task and he gingerly eased the loops around the baby fingernail-sized hitches so that the three train cars could be pulled along in a reasonable approximation of the one we were on. Oliver coaxed us to “board the train,” and we travelled our index and middle fingers like legs towards the door.

When his interest waned, the cardboard train sat stationary on his tray table. When space was required for food, he gently eased it onto the narrow window ledge. While it was in this berth, a boy, a slightly older than Oliver and much more electronically accessorized, spied the cardboard train. Despite its modest configurations, he expressed envy: “I like your train,” he declared to Oliver with an understatement that betrayed his urge to covet. While Oliver indifferently acknowledged the boy and his compliment, a row or so over, the boy’s mother detected the vibe. “Where did you get the train?” she asked, her voice breaking past her husband’s cellphone conversation and tapping on his laptop. I mentioned the ticket clerk, to which the boy asked, hope blooming in his voice, if I was referring to the one who occasionally strode down the aisle of our train.

I felt genuinely sorry to disappoint him. After clarifying that we’d gotten it in Toronto, I suggested that if they were going to Montreal, they should ask at the ticket window at the station there. I held up the bag in case they had to describe it. Mother and son soberly nodded their comprehension. Montreal was still hours away. The boy turned away, consoling himself with one of his gadgets, now rather devalued by something he could not have.

My sympathy for the boy’s bereft feelings was eclipsed by my relief that it wasn’t Oliver experiencing that longing. I don’t know if he would have been so stoic. Dodging any potential anxiety imparts a momentary sense of parental victory, and with that to savour, however brief, I turned back to the book.

With movies as a frame, the reader watches the wonderful bond developing between father and son.

Much of The Film Club reflects Gilmour’s awareness that his time with his son is fleeting. But he also demonstrates a sense of balance in his writing to reflect his anxieties about his own professional delinquency, a state with no certain end. Although Jesse’s mother (actress Maggie Huculak) and Gilmour’s wife Tina Gladstone are on board with the film club, all the adults in the story can’t really decide whether Gilmour’s idea of watching movies is wonderfully creative or the next step in Jesse’s slide into career oblivion. Gilmour himself frets that his son will become a pot-smoking cabbie and that he’s exacerbating that possibility by filling Jesse’s head with unmarketable bon mots on the French New Wave or pointing out how Steve Spielberg got the director’s nod for Jaws by making a truck look menacing in Duel.

As a film buff a few notches below Gilmour’s zeal, I found these nuggets absorbing, even when I wasn’t familiar with the film he was discussing. With the films I did know, such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Annie Hall, I made a mental note to look at them again, particularly the scenes Gilmour identifies as key in the narratives or the back story. Those moments recalled my earlier respect for Gilmour’s film criticism, ever since he expounded on Howards End. I’d loved those glorious Merchant Ivory adaptations of E. M. Forster’s novels, but when Gilmour stared at the camera and carefully said, “There’s something dead at the centre of this movie,” I was jolted into reconsidering my swooning affection for those frothy confections. I can’t remember if Merchant Ivory did any more Forsters (pretty much all of his novels had been filmed by then anyway), but while I still love A Room with a View, both novel and film, I think Gilmour effectively killed my interest in Merchant Ivory films. Thinking of his blunt comment about Howards End also suggested his priority of the authenticity of experiences and relationships: if Jesse did not feel alive in his academic experience, then a more creative solution was necessary.

With movies as a frame, the reader watches the wonderful bond developing between father and son. Not only was Jesse becoming a more sophisticated movie viewer, he was learning about girls, sometimes aided by a movie (early on, they view Basic Instinct which Jesse deems “a great film,” and this judgment seems to influence his choice in his first girlfriend). His sometimes clumsy attempts to understand his girlfriends occur at a close enough distance that his father could observe and chronicle with an almost anthropological perspective. Before their film club, Jesse had lived with his mother, and as a sign of her commitment (“He needs to live with a man,” Gilmour quotes her), she agreed to change residences and live in Gilmour’s loft while he and his wife moved into her house. Jesse would introduce his father to each girlfriend before leading his latest flame down to his basement bedroom, and old dad would head to the furthest point away in the house. It’s a testimony of Jesse’s trust in his father to allow him to write about the handful of girls who appear in the story. I kept wondering if Gilmour used their real names (there’s no indication either way anywhere in the book) because he draws them so vividly – their personalities are so clearly defined even as they so obviously struggle to figure out their own identities.

As Jesse becomes more steeped in films and their historical context, his relationships with girls (they feel like they’re still a few steps short of being women) become more fraught and sometimes reach soap-opera proportions. Gradually, Jesse develops from being a typically circumspect teenager to a thoughtful young man who turns to his father for advice and perspective in love and lust. And though Jesse screws up a few times, he earns his father’s – and the reader’s – respect with his willingness to examine his actions with the studious discernment he has increasingly been giving the films they are watching. That this development is conveyed through Gilmour’s own eyes is admirable as the father recognizes his son’s blossoming maturity and the writer articulates the experience potently. It is further admirable because it is an experience that most fathers rarely have, especially those who leave for the office before their children are awake and return sometime after the kids are in bed or immersed in their own activities.

This part of the story is so compelling that any parent may be tempted to seriously consider quitting the job grind, yanking the teenaged kid out of school and heading to the video store. But, Gilmour essentially says, don’t try this at home. His awareness that the richness and intensity of this stage of their relationship is unique and will soon slip away injects a sense of nostalgia even before it’s over. As Jesse spends more time away from home, especially after he finds a fulfilling job as a prep cook in a Toronto restaurant, Gilmour’s own professional prospects also improve. Watching films becomes an occasional rather than a regular habit, and Gilmour can see the club winding down. Gilmour sells his loft and he and his wife buy a house, and his ex-wife is able to reclaim her own. Jesse keeps in touch by phone and regular visits, but Gilmour knows he’s flown the nest.

That’s not the end of the story, and I’m not even going to mention whether the ending is happy, sad or somewhere in between. I was actually able to read almost the whole book while eastern Ontario trundled by like a Mobius strip, and we began to catch road signs in French. Oliver discovered a cute little girl at the other end of our train car, and he would run down the aisle, giggling toward her and then racing away almost as quickly. Larry assigned himself sentry duty so that Oliver wouldn’t crash into other passengers who quickly became the audience and cheerleaders for Oliver’s overtures of puppy love.

When Larry said he was taking a bathroom break, I put the book down and trailed Oliver to the object of his affection. Although they hadn’t seemed to exchange names, they’d clearly established a comfortable rapport. The little girl likely knew she didn’t need to do much to entice Oliver’s interested presence as she lounged in her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs and flipping her hair behind her shoulder. She sat across from her sister and mother who was holding another child, a two-month old baby, and we all witnessed the dialogue of nascent courtship.

Little Girl: I can speak English and Arabic.

Oliver: I can speak English and French.

I had to smile and suppress a laugh at Oliver’s swagger. Although Larry speaks French fluently, he treats it as a professional obligation and generally leaves it at the office. Sporadically, I summon up barely remembered phrases from high-school French with less-than-perfect enunciation. So Oliver is effectively monolingual, his only real exposure to French is our prelude to dinner when we clink our glasses and exclaim, “Bon appetit!” The only other French words he knows are from the bilingual content of a placemat he occasionally uses, so he thinks of French in terms of the words that correspond to words he already knows in English. As we moved further into Quebec, he became curious about the stop signs, and upon hearing the word “Arrêt,” he practised its pronunciation as he saw the signs over the weekend. When he heard others speak in French, he tried imitating the sounds, which came out as a gravelly mumble. But to this little girl, he assumed the guise of a boy of the world.

Thinking of Gilmour’s own accounts of Jesse’s romantic trials and errors, I realized Oliver would be there perhaps sooner than I expected, and in need of wise parental advice. I concede he’ll likely turn to Larry and I might be locked out of such discussions. If that happens, I’ll take The Film Club off the shelf, hand it to him and tell (or text-message) him, “Enjoy the book, but please stay in school. I’m here if you want to talk. Love, Mom.” And then suggest we sit down and watch a movie together.

* Shortly after writing an early draft of this review, I saw David Gilmour in our neighbourhood, decided to introduce myself and tell him I'd written a review of his book. We had a pleasant conversation and he e-mailed me the photo of him, which I've gratefully included with this review.