Film school   

Author David Gilmour, left, with his son Jesse. (Thomas Allen Publishers)

Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, David Gilmour’s son Jesse was a smart, sensitive, restless, chain-smoking 16-year-old who was flunking out of everything at school. We’re not sure how Holden’s father reacted to his son’s failing (apart from sister Phoebe’s dire prediction: “Daddy’ll kill you!”), but we do know award-winning author Gilmour’s response to Jesse’s situation. As he tells it in his engaging new memoir, The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son, a perplexed and exasperated Gilmour finally let Jesse drop out, with only two conditions: he couldn’t do drugs, and he had to agree to watch three movies a week with the old man.

As Jesse might have put it, “sweet.”

What followed in the Gilmours’ Toronto living room over the next three years was a kind of loose, ongoing film appreciation class, with Gilmour, a one-time film critic for CBC television, tutoring Jesse on the acting subtleties of Gary Cooper and James Dean, the influences of the French New Wave and the guilty pleasures of Showgirls. But much more than that, the “club” became an opportunity for a father to connect with his son at an age when most boys are beginning to shut their parents out of their lives.

“Really, we could just as well have gone skydiving together,” says Gilmour, a tall man in his late 50s with a mop of grey hair and John Lennon glasses. “It wasn’t about the movies, it was about doing what is incredibly important when you have teenage children, which is spending time with them. The thing about teenage boys is that they appear not to need much attention, when in fact they need a tremendous amount, and they need it from their fathers.”

As it happened, Gilmour had plenty of free time to give that attention. Random House, up until then his publisher, had rejected his latest novel and he couldn’t find work as an arts journalist. At 50, he was facing a midlife career crisis even as he was embarking on a dubious home-schooling experiment with his only son. “I thought I had mismanaged my entire life: no publisher for my novel and no income,” he recalls. “And I’m looking after this kid who has been sent over to me by his mother because he’s got out of control, and I can’t even earn a living.”

In fact, Jesse’s mother and Gilmour’s ex-wife, actress Maggie Huculak, had temporarily given Gilmour her house in Greektown (in exchange for his small loft), so father and son could live together. During the day, the two could often be seen through the front window, sprawled on a couch, screening videos. “There were neighbours walking by, looking in and going, ‘What are they doing in there? The kid’s dropped out of school, he’s watching TV all day with his dad. What a pair of bums,’” Gilmour says. “Every so often I’d think, maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m making a really big mistake here. I’m so hip, I’m calling it something else, but maybe this is just a flat-out f---up.”

Those moments of doubt were finally assuaged by the realization that he was spending precious time with Jesse — even if his original intention to use films as life lessons didn’t quite pan out. Gilmour had weighed his movie choices toward popular fare and picked plenty of personal favourites, but Jesse didn’t always share his tastes. Like Holden, he was quick to condemn anything he considered phony.

(Thomas Allen Publishers)

“At least a third of the stuff he thought was bullshit,” Gilmour says. “I thought he’d really dig A Hard Day’s Night or really like Close Encounters, and he hated them. It was very humbling. And I began to see them through his eyes and I thought, actually, A Hard Day’s Night is a bit overrated, it is a bit corny. The Beatles were becoming professionally cute by the time they did that movie. He’s right. You see, he didn’t come to movies as an intellectual, he came to movies as a watcher, so his instincts in a way are more trustworthy than mine.”

Although Gilmour is quick to belittle his skills as a critic, his writing about film here is lively (there’s a great description of the way actor Robert Mitchum “drift[s] through a movie with the effortlessness of a cat wandering into a dinner party”) and he’s at his most enthusiastic when finding the virtues in trashy stuff like Magnum Force and Basic Instinct. (He’s the kind of critic who thinks The Shining is Stanley Kubrick’s best film.)

However, what makes The Film Club a compelling and, finally, moving read is Gilmour’s affectionate but honest depiction of Jesse as a young man coming up against all the dangers and pains of adolescent experience, from hard-drug use (“That was a killer,” says Gilmour, “it just about made me mental”) to heartbreak. Jesse went through two major breakups with girlfriends at the time, and instead of talking about movies, he ended up spilling his guts to his sympathetic dad.

“If you are sexually or romantically distraught over a woman, you can’t think or talk about anything else,” says Gilmour, who, as the book makes clear, has had plenty of experience on that front. “I just couldn’t shut him up. The one thing that made me feel good about it was that I felt like he was lancing a boil on his soul and all this poison was coming out of it, that he was healing himself while he spoke to me about it.”

This isn’t the first time Gilmour has used one of his children as a literary muse. He says Jesse also served as the model for the missing six-year-old boy in A Perfect Night to Go to China, his last novel, which won a 2005 Governor General’s award. And a fictional version of Maggie, his daughter from his first marriage, appeared in his debut novel, 1986’s Back on Tuesday. “She’s the girl that the distraught dad kidnaps to punish his ex-wife.”

It was Jesse himself who suggested that Gilmour write The Film Club. “I was going to write a book about how to get over a woman,” Gilmour says, “and he said, ‘That’s a terrible idea. All your novels are about that. Put it to sleep. Why don’t you write about you and me sitting around on the couch for three years watching movies?’” Nonetheless, Jesse was shocked when he initially read the manuscript and saw the candid portrait his father had painted. He’s since made peace with it, Gilmour says, and is even helping promote the book.

We know that Gilmour came out of his career slump — the novel rejected by Random House, rewritten and released by his current publisher, Thomas Allen, was the GG-winning Perfect Night. And, without spoiling The Film Club, it’s safe to say that his nerve-wracking gamble with Jesse paid off. “He turned out to be gold,” Gilmour says with relief, “but I wasn’t sure that he was; I didn’t know that he wasn’t going to turn into an asshole or a drug addict or a drunk. You’re never sure. Your kids don’t turn out they way you think they will, ever.”

Son and father are now both at the University of Toronto, Jesse as a student and his dad as a visiting literary professor. “He’s not taking my course,” Gilmour says with a laugh. “You know what? I think he’s going to move into film studies.”

The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son is published by Thomas Allen.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.