The Film Club: A True Story of A Father and Son (2007) is one of the most engrossing reads of the last year for me. Here’s the real-life set up: David Gilmour, a creative writer and television personality, is seriously out of work, and his son drops out of school in Grade 10. But there are two conditions to quitting school: young Jesse has to watch at least 3 films a week with his dad, and no drugs or the entire deal is off. A creative and risky arrangement. Obviously, there are three things you can be interested in—father, teenager, and films. I found the growing and evolving father-son relationship the most interesting, and it pulled me through the book in three days.
The film discussions were interesting in a weird way: David takes an entirely different approach to critiquing films than I do. To oversimplify, I take a macro view, he a micro. At the base of all my viewing is Aristotle. The old Greek scientist wonders why all those people are so crazy about seeing plays, so he goes out and watches the crowd and the plays, and he decides in large part that it is the plot—what will happen next in the action, and what will happen next with the characters? It’s the emotional roller coaster the audience goes through watching these changes. David, who has reviewed for national newspapers and other media, favours the specific. Before watching Hitchcock, he might ask Jesse to watch for the most foreboding image. Another time the scene with the best dialogue. He discusses in some detail a sequence of wide, medium, and close-up shots of Audrey Hepburn sitting on a balcony. The scattering of film comments are perceptive and are accessible to film buffs because David chooses his movies from the canon—The Bicycle Thief, The Exorcist, The 400 Blows, Fistful of Dollars, True Romance, On the Waterfront, and two more pages of movies. For me, David’s most revelatory comment on film occurs when he is planning a second look at some films: “We’d . . . take another look at Pulp Fiction (1994), making clear, though, the distinction between fun writing and true writing. Pulp Fiction, immensely entertaining as it is, spiffy and glittery as the dialogue is, doesn’t have a real human moment in it” (p. 232). Again this shows my preference for the broader critical comments. But the real star of the book is the relationship between father and son. It is Canadian, so eminently polite, but the feelings run ever so deep.