The Film Club (20 page)

“Everything okay over there?” I'd say.

He'd shift his tall body on the couch. “I'm fine.” I gave him another smash of Buried Treasures, like giving a kid his dessert before the main course. Anything to get his attention off his own excoriating imagination. Anything to make him laugh.

I showed him
Ishtar
(1987). I've taken hit after hit for this film but I remain obdurate. No one would disagree that the story stumbles when the two failed musicians, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, arrive in the desert kingdom of Ishtar and get embroiled in local politics. But before and after, there are such comic gems, Warren and Dustin wearing little headbands and singing their hearts out and doing a two-step. Heaven.
Ishtar
is a fine, flawed film that was garrotted at birth because a peevish press got tired of Warren having so many pretty girlfriends.

It didn't help Jesse, though. I might as well have shown him a documentary on a nail factory.

We watched a lot of Buried Treasures over the next few weeks. I could feel Jesse's agitation on the couch beside me; it felt as if his body was coiled, like an animal waiting in the dark. Sometimes I'd stop the film. I'd say, “Do you want to keep going?”

“Sure,” he'd say, coming out of a trance.

There's a story about Elmore Leonard I've always liked. During the '50s, he was an advertising copywriter for Chevrolet. To come up with a jazzy buzz line for their line of half-ton trucks, Leonard went into the field to interview the guys who drove them. One guy said, “You can't wear the son-of-a-bitch out. You just get sick of looking at it and buy another one.”

The Chevy executives laughed when Leonard presented it to them, but said no thanks; that wasn't quite what they had in mind for the nation's billboards. But it was exactly the kind of talk that turned up in Leonard's novels a decade later when he turned to crime fiction. It captured the feel of ordinariness without actually being ordinary.

Do you remember this scene in the 1995 film
Get
Shorty
? Chili Palmer gets an expensive coat ripped off in a restaurant; he doesn't say, “Hey, where's my coat, it cost four hundred bucks.” Instead, he takes the owner aside and says, “You see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, has lapels like a suit coat? You don't, you owe me three seventy-nine.” That's vintage Elmore Leonard dialogue. Amusing and
specific
.

Or how about this little bit of business from the 1995 thriller
Riding the Rap
: U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens has just come upon two unsuspecting felons in the middle of a carjack. Leonard describes what follows this way: “Givens put the shotgun on the two guys and did something every lawman knew guaranteed attention and respect. He racked the pump on the shotgun, back and forward, and that hard metallic sound, better than blowing a whistle, brought the two guys around to see they were out of business.”

There have been lots of films based on Elmore Leonard novels.
Hombre
back in 1967 with Paul Newman,
Mr.
Majestyk
(1974),
Stick
with Burt Reynolds in '85,
52
Pick
Up
(1986). More often than not, these early films didn't pick up on the black humour and the outrageously good chit-chat. It took a generation of new and younger filmmakers to get those things right. Quentin Tarantino made a lovely, if slightly too long, film called
Jackie Brown
(1997);
Get Shorty
nailed the Elmore Leonard tone; it's also worth noting
en passant
that it was the film's star, John Travolta, who insisted that the dialogue from the novel be used in the film.

And then in 1998 came director Steven Soderbergh's
Out of Sight
with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Critics loved it but people didn't buy tickets and, same old sad story, it dropped out of sight very quickly. Which was too bad because it was one of the best films of that year. It's a classic Buried Treasure and that's why I picked it for Jesse.

Before we rolled I asked him to watch for an actor named Steve Zhan in the film. He plays a kind of stoned-out loser named Glen. I don't know if he actually steals the movie from Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney but he comes awfully close. Here's an unknown actor, a Harvard graduate by the way, who couldn't even get an audition for the film, who had to make his own audition video and send it to the director. Soderbergh watched fifteen seconds of the tape and said, “Here's our guy.”

Again, I don't know how much of the film Jesse actually “saw.” He seemed to come in and out of the story, and I think he was relieved when it was over; he skedaddled upstairs pretty fast.

Then I hit it, a movie that was so good, that knocked Jesse so hard on his behind, for a few hours he appeared to stop thinking about Chloë entirely.

Years ago, walking down Yonge Street in Toronto on a summer's day I ran into an old friend. We hadn't seen each other for a while and decided to see a movie on the spot, the best way to go to the movies. We looked in at a nearby theatre, six films playing. “You got to see this one,” he said. “You just have to.”

So we did.
True Romance
(1993) is an almost unbearably watchable film. A treat you should only let yourself see every six months. Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay about cocaine, murder and puppy love when he was twenty-five years old. It was his first screenplay. For five years he shopped it around; no takers. It had a kind of freshness that studio heads confused with “doing it wrong.” It was only when he made
Reservoir Dogs
(1992), when the “word” was out on him, that the British director Tony Scott took it on.

True Romance
has an eight- or nine-minute encounter between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken that may well be, for me, the best stand-alone scene in film. (I know you only get to say that once and I've saved it up.) It is exhilarating to watch what good actors can do when the “architecture” of beautiful dialogue is under their feet. You can feel also their pleasure in each other's work. They're showing off. As I sat in the dark theatre, as the scene began, Christopher Walken announcing, “I am the Antichrist,” my friend leaned over and whispered, “Here we go.”

There are other considerable treats in the movie: a theatrical Gary Oldman as a dreadlocked drug dealer; here's a man who's so completely at home with violence that he can, as Jesse observed, “eat Chinese food with chopsticks seconds before it happens.” There's Brad Pitt as a California pothead, Val Kilmer as the ghost of Elvis Presley—it just goes on and on.

I told Jesse to hang on for the film's final declaration of love, Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette frolicking on a Mexican beach, the sun setting in a blaze of gold and blood-red clouds, her voice saying, “You're so cool, you're so cool, you're so cool.”

It made him feel good, that last scene. Gave him some kind of private goose, as if there was some beautiful girl out there who was going to catch
him
gliding down a bar some night when just the right song was playing. “You are
so
cool.”

Later, we were huddled in coats, the first snow falling in glittering sparkles that vanished when they hit the ground. “I never liked watching films with Chloë,” Jesse said. “I hated the things she said.”

“You can't be with a woman you can't go to the movies with,” I said (sounding like Grandpa Walton). “What sort of things did she say?”

He watched the snow falling for a moment; in the light from the street lamps his eyes seemed very shiny, like glass. “Stupid things. She was trying to be provocative. It was part of her young-professional thing.”

“That sounds rather tiresome.”

“It is when you're watching a film you really love. You don't want somebody trying to be ‘interesting.' You want them just to love it. You know what she said once? She said Stanley Kubrick's
Lolita
was better than Adrian Lyne's.” He shook his head and hunched forward. For a second he looked like a young soldier. “That's got to be wrong,” he said. “Adrian Lyne's
Lolita
is a masterpiece.”

“It is.”

He said, “I showed her
The Godfather
. But just before we started I said, ‘I don't really want to hear any criticisms of this film, okay?'”

“What did she say?”

“She said I was being ‘controlling.' That she had a right to her opinion.”

“What did you say?”

“‘Not about
The Godfather
you don't.'”

“What happened then?”

“We had a fight, I imagine,” he said wearily. (All thoughts lead to Rome.) The snow seemed to fall harder now; it spun and twirled by the street lights; you could see it against the headlights of the cars as they moved down our street. “I just wanted her to love it. That simple.”

“I don't know, Jesse, this doesn't sound like a dream love affair to me. You can't go to the movies together because she bugs you; you can't go for a walk with her because she bores you.”

He shook his head. “Funny,” he said after a moment, “I can't remember any of that stuff now. I can only remember having a great time.”

My wife came out; the porch light went on. There was a shriek of chair legs on the wood. The conversation halted, then started up again. She knew not to leave. After a while I left the two of them alone. I thought there was something she could tell him that might make him feel better. She had been quite the party girl, our Tina, in her young university years. I knew there was a spin she could put on this Morgan business but I had a feeling I should absent myself for the anecdote it would entail. At one point I looked out the living room window; they were sitting very close together. She was talking; he was listening; then, to my surprise, I heard something I didn't expect: the sound of laughter; they were laughing.

It became something of a ritual at the end of the day for the two of them to retreat to the porch for a cigarette and a chat. I never accompanied them, it was private and it comforted me to know Jesse had an older woman (breathtakingly experienced) to talk to. I knew she told him things I probably didn't know about her university days, or her later “party years” as she called them. I never inquired what was exchanged between the two of them. Some doors are best left shut.

I see from my yellow cards that I contemplated showing him
It's a Wonderful Life
again, but, afraid he'd see Chloë in the Donna Reed role, I pulled back at the last second and showed him
Murmur of the Heart
(1971). I was reluctant to play a French art film—I knew he wanted to be entertained— but here was a film so good I thought it was worth the shot.

Like
The
400
Blows
, Louis Malle's
Murmur of the Heart
is about growing up, about the strange awkwardness, the extravagantly rich interior life that young boys experience at the very beginning of manhood. It is a period of remarkable vulnerability that writers love to return to—I suppose because it's a time when things register profoundly, when the cement is still soft.

The boy in
Murmur of the Heart
seems to carry that vulnerability in his body, the slightly rounded shoulders, the gangly arms, the sort of giraffe-like bumping and banging as he makes his way through the world. There is a feel of terrific nostalgia about this film, as if the writer, Louis Malle, was writing about a time in his life when he was very, very happy and didn't realize it till years later. It is also a film which savours the small details of adolescence with such a keen eye that it all feels familiar—there are flashes of recognition, as if you, too, grew up in a French family, in a small town in the '50s.

And what a climax. It's hard to believe that anyone could end a film the way Louis Malle chose to end this one. I won't say any more except to add that every so often an event happens in your life which reminds you that no matter how well you think you know someone, even though you think you can account for every important moment of their life, you don't and you can't.

“Good
God
!” Jesse said, looking over at me first with incredulity, then with uncomfortable amusement, then admiration. “Now there's a director with balls!”

While we were watching these Buried Treasures, Jesse making observations here and there, it again surprised me how much he'd learned about movies over the past three years. Not that it mattered that much to him; he would have traded it all, I think, for the phone to ring.

“You know,” I said when the movie was over, “you've become quite an accomplished film critic.”

“Yeah?” he said absently.

“You know more about movies than I did when I was the national film critic for the CBC.”

“Yeah?” Not much interest. (Why do we never want to do the things we're good at?)

“You could
be
a film critic,” I said.

“I just know the stuff I like. Nothing else.”

After a bit, I said gently, “Indulge me here, okay?”

“All right.”

I said, “Off the top of your head, can you tell me three innovations that came with the French New Wave?”

He sort of blinked and sat up. “Um, low budgets—?”

“Yep.”

“Fluid camera work—?”

“Yes.”

“Movies going outside the studios and into the streets?”

“Can you name three New Wave directors?” I said.

“Truffaut, Goddard and Eric Rohmer.” (He was getting into it now.)

“What is the expression in French for New Wave?”

“Nouvelle vague.”

“What is your favourite scene from Hitchcock's
The
Birds
?”

“The scene where you see an empty tree over the guy's shoulder and the next time you see it it's full of birds.”

“Why is that good?”

“Because it lets the audience know something bad is going to happen.”