I have an Amazon Kindle and I love my Kindle and I am reading more than I have in months. I also have a New York Tiimes subscription on my Kindle so this morning, I was busy reading the Sunday Book Review and came across this (see below). Because I can buy books at a touch of a button, I did and now I am halfway through it. The book is great and the descriptions of movies (and little trivia tidbits) are even better. Highly recommended! Even if you don't own a Kindle and have to acquire this book the old fashioned way, I'd still suggest seeking it out.
THE FILM CLUB
By David Gilmour.
225 pp. Twelve. $21.99.July 6, 2008
Home ScreeningBy DOUGLAS McGRATH
Since I became a father, I have read stories about parents and their children with a humiliating lack of emotional armor. Right after our son was born, someone gave me a copy of Scott Berg’s biography of Charles Lindbergh. I thought it was wonderful until the Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, and then my stomach knotted up so badly I had to put the book away. Instead I read Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger,” a story of a homeless writer almost starving to death, and it was like a light comedy by comparison.
David Gilmour is a father as well as a novelist and former film critic. He has written a memoir, “The Film Club,” about his decision to allow his 15-year-old son, Jesse, to drop out of school on the condition that he watch three movies a week of Gilmour’s choosing. Because it smacked of a plot gimmick from one of the movies Gilmour used to review, I feared the book would be similarly cute and tidy. But it’s a heartfelt portrait of how hard it is to grow up, how hard it is to watch someone grow up and how in the midst of a family’s confusion and ire, there is sometimes nothing so welcome as a movie.
Given that Gilmour was a film critic, a lot of the book is about the films he and Jesse watch. Their discussions give you a quick and appealing sense of the kind of people they are. You can wonder at the Gilmours’ acuity or insanity, depending on how close they are to your own opinions. I do not share Gilmour’s view that Gene Kelly has a “malignant phoniness” in “Singin’ in the Rain,” nor his view that “The Exorcist” is the scariest movie ever made — if you’re interested in malignant phoniness, I’d look no farther than “The Exorcist.” I am certainly not “bewildered” as Gilmour is by the praise for John Ford’s beautiful and haunting film “The Searchers” — John Wayne’s unnervingly dark performance alone makes it essential viewing. On the other hand, I agree with him about Clint Eastwood and “Psycho” and “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The 400 Blows.” And he made me curious to see some films I didn’t know.
But the book is not a catalog of film recommendations. Gilmour uses the movies and, more important, the time he and Jesse spent together watching them, as an opening to explore and maybe understand who each of them is. The book chronicles Jesse’s troubles — mostly with girls, but also with drinking and drugs. And it does not spare Gilmour: he is out of work when the story starts, at an age when finding something new is both difficult and embarrassing. But he is modest about his own problems and doesn’t ask for pity. Like any good parent, he focuses on his son and he makes us care very much about what happens to him.
Like the two men at its center, the book itself stumbles every so often. Early on, I wanted to know more about Gilmour’s decision to let his son quit school in exchange for watching three films a week. That doesn’t seem like much of a standard for a boy as quick and smart as Jesse; I wondered why he set the bar so low. I also wanted to know more about why he felt that watching movies was a worthy equivalent to a more formal education. Or even an informal one. Gilmour is a novelist, yet he never made reading a part of the deal; I wondered why. I’m not trying to set up a home-schooling system for the Gilmours. I just would have liked to hear his case for why he felt movies were a better way to reach his son than museums or books or Outward Bound.
This is a minor sin of omission; there was for me a more bothersome sin of commission. Gilmour has a fondness for simile that sometimes exceeds his gift for it. There were phrases that many times took me out of the story, making me think about things that temporarily severed my connection to the material. For instance, Gilmour writes: “How little I can give him, I thought — just these little apple slices of reassurance, like feeding a rare animal at the zoo.” (Is an apple really an image of reassurance? Hasn’t he ever read Genesis? Is feeding rare animals at the zoo a way to comfort them or just a way to feed them?) Later he writes: “The trees, budding at their very tips like fingernails, appeared to be extending their branches toward the sun.” (Do the tips of budding trees really look like fingernails? I know he was distracted with his son, but maybe Gilmour needs a manicure.) Or: “For the moment we were on the porch, his spirits temporarily lifted from their coffin, to which they would return, like ghosts at sunset.” (I’m not that up on the afterworld, but do ghosts go back to their graves at sunset? Don’t they get up at sunset and sleep during the day? Or are those vampires?)
These are not the things I wanted to be thinking about as I read “The Film Club,” not only because they distracted me from a story I was interested in, but because Gilmour is as capable of the deft phrase as the daft. I loved his reference to someone’s boyfriend as “a damp-handed nightmare.” Or this quick and vivid description: “I went out that night, got ecstatically, knee-walking drunk.” The movie “Bullitt,” he says, “has the authority of stainless steel” — a perfect image for that tough and shiny film. Best of all was this sentence that captured the reality-altering magic that movies cast: “I remember emerging from the Nortown theater that summer afternoon and thinking that there was something wrong with the sunlight.”
My regard for Gilmour’s best writing, my sympathy for his struggles and my engagement in his story make my complaints seem small. If his style sometimes irked me, he has my admiration as a father for making his son, not himself, the very winning hero of this story. Not only did I find Jesse smart and funny, but more than once I was moved to tears by his battle to find his place. At the end of the book, Gilmour, helpless with love for his son, watches him onstage performing, and recalls a line from “True Romance,” a movie they’d both loved: “You’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool!”
Not only as a reader but as a father, too, I know how he feels.
Douglas McGrath is a writer and director. Among his films are “Emma,” “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Infamous.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/books/review/McGrath2-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=books&pagewanted=print
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