The Film Club (7 page)

“Nothing wrong with being obsessed with a woman, Jesse.”

“Have you ever been?”

“Please,” I said, “don't let me commence.”

“I haven't told my mom. She'll start crying and talking about Claire's feelings. Are you surprised?”

“About Rebecca? No. I always thought you had a second act there.”

“Do you think so? Is that right?” The idea excited him and I felt a sudden pang of dread, as if I were watching him drive a slowly accelerating car toward a cement wall.

“Can I just say one thing to you?”

“Sure.”

“Love affairs that start in blood tend to end up in blood.”

The waiter came over and collected a few chairs from the table next to us and took them inside the café.

“Jesus, Dad.”

5

When I got back from Cuba, I was mildly surprised not to find a phone message from Derek H. The first shoot of the Viagra documentary was supposed to start in a month; we had no final script. I waited a day, then another and sent him a jolly e-mail. (I loathed its tone of phony camaraderie.)

His answer came almost immediately. He had been offered a two-hour documentary on Nelson Mandela; full interview access to him, to his ex-wife, even some of his cronies from prison. There was a time factor at play, Mandela was eighty-four years old, surely I could understand. He was, Derek concluded, terribly sorry, but he had just “run out of time.”

I was floored. Not to mention broke after the “celebratory” trip to Cuba. I also felt that I'd been “had.” Lured into a frivolous, undignified piece of work that made me look like a fool. I remembered my words to Jesse in the cathedral square, the missionary's zeal with which I'd delivered them. “You never get
anything worth getting
from an asshole.”

I stomped up and down the living room with my fists clenched and swearing revenge; Jesse listened quietly, numb with guilt, I imagine. I went to bed drunk; woke up at four in the morning to pee; just as I flushed the toilet, my watch slipped from my wrist and whirled down the chute. I sat down on the toilet seat and had a small, private weep. Here I'd let Jesse drop out of school, I'd promised to look after him and now it turned out I couldn't even look after myself. A bullshitter, just like Claire Brinkman's father.

By morning, I could feel a kind of terror spread through my chest like poison, my heart raced; it was as if a belt was slowly tightening around me. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. Just to do something, to move, I climbed onto my bicycle and rode downtown. It was a funereal summer day, muggy and full of unattractive people. I was walking through a narrow laneway, when I crisscrossed a bike courier riding cautiously my way. He was wearing sunglasses, a big bag thrown over his shoulder, gloves without fingers. But what interested me about him was that he appeared to be my age. “Excuse me,” I said. “You're a courier, yes?”

“Yes.”

I asked him if he had time for a few questions. How much did he make? About $120 a day. A
day
? Yep, if he hustled. I asked who he worked for, he named the company. He was an easygoing fellow with perfect white teeth.

“Do you think it might be possible for me to get a job with your company?” I asked.

He raised his sunglasses and looked at me with a pair of clear blue eyes. “Aren't you the guy from television?”

“Not at this moment.”

He said, “I used to watch you all the time. I saw you interview Michael Moore. What a prick that guy is.”

I said, “So what do you think?”

He looked down the alleyway and frowned. He said, “Well, we have an age limit. You've got to be under fifty.”

I said, “Are you under fifty?”

“No, but I've been there a long time.”

I said, “Could you do me a favour? Could you speak to your boss on my behalf? Tell him I'm not fooling around here, I'll stay for at least six months, I'm in good shape.”

He hesitated. “That's going to be a pretty weird conversation.”

I wrote down my phone number and my name and gave it to him.

“I'd be really grateful,” I said.

A day went by; then a few days; then nothing; I never heard back from him.

“Can you believe this?” I said to Tina. “I can't even get a job as a fucking bike courier.”

In the middle of a silent breakfast the following morning, I rose from my chair and went back to bed, fully clothed. I put my head under the covers and tried to get back to sleep. A few moments later I felt a presence like a small bird alight on the side of the bed.

“I can help you with this,” Tina said, “but you have to let me. You can't fight with me.”

An hour later she gave me a list of twenty names. Newspaper editors, cable television producers, people in public relations, speechwriters, even a local politician we vaguely knew. She said, “You have to call these people and tell them you're available for work.”

“I already have.”

“No, you haven't. You just looked up your old pals.”

I looked at the first name on the list. “Not that fuck-weed. I can't call
him
!”

She shushed me. “You said you wouldn't fight about this.”

So I didn't. I gave myself a day's respite and then I sat down at the kitchen table and started making calls. And to my surprise, she was right. Most everybody was pretty decent. They didn't have anything for me for the moment, but they were friendly, encouraging.

In a moment of energized optimism (phoning is better than waiting), I said to Jesse, “This is my problem, not yours.” But he wasn't a lout or a parasite and I could feel him tiptoeing around “the situation,” could feel him almost wince when he asked for ten dollars for this, ten dollars for that. But what could he do? He didn't have a bean. His mother was helping out but she was an actor, a stage actor at that. And it certainly wasn't up to Tina to crack into her savings (started when she was sixteen) to support my son whose free-floating, it'll-happen-dude posture I had so confidently encouraged. In the middle of the night (when little good comes from thinking about anything), I wondered how unpleasant things were going to get, how toxic the atmosphere around money, if my luck didn't change soon.

The film club resumed. To lure Jesse into watching more movies without making it too school-like, I made up a game of spot-the-great-moment. This meant a scene or a bit of dialogue or image that snaps you forward in your seat; makes your heart bang. We started with an easy one, Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining
(1980), the story of a failed writer (Jack Nicholson) who goes slowly mad in a deserted hotel and tries to murder his family.

The Shining
is probably director Stanley Kubrick's (
Dr.
Strangelove
[1964] and
2001
[1968]) best film. But Stephen King, the author of the novel, loathed the movie and disliked Kubrick. A lot of people did; Kubrick was famous for being a finicky, self-adoring man who made actors do things over and over with questionable results; when Jack Nicholson ambushes Scatman Crothers with an axe in
The Shining
, Kubrick made them do it forty times; finally, seeing that the seventy-year-old Crothers was exhausted, Nicholson told Kubrick that was enough takes, he wasn't going to do it again.

Later on in the filming, Jack pursued his knife-wielding wife (Shelley Duvall) up the stairs fifty-eight times before Kubrick was happy. (Was it worth the work? Could the second or third take have done as well? Probably.)

But more importantly, Stephen King felt that Kubrick just “didn't get it” when it came to horror, didn't have a clue how it worked. King went to an early screening of
The Shining
and came away disgusted; he said the movie was like a Cadillac without an engine. “You get in, you can smell the leather, but you can't drive it anywhere.” In fact, he went on to say he thought Kubrick made movies to “hurt people.”

Which I sort of agree with; but I love
The Shining
; I love the way it's shot and lit: I love the sound of the tricycle wheels going from carpet to wood to carpet. It always scares me when the twin girls appear in the hallway. For my great moment though, I picked the scene where Jack Nicholson hallucinates a conversation between himself and a hotel waiter, a stiff, British-butler type. It takes place in an almost blindingly lit washroom—electric orange and white. The dialogue begins innocently enough but then the waiter warns Jack that his young son is “making trouble,” that maybe he should be “dealt with.” The waiter (Philip Stone) steals the scene with his precise stillness and quiet line readings; watch the way he closes his dry lips at the end of each phrase. It's like a delicate, vaguely obscene punctuation mark.

He too had problems with children, the waiter confides. One of them didn't like the hotel and tried to burn it down. But he “corrected him” (with an axe). “And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her.” It's a letter-perfect performance. Unlike Jack's, which has not aged so well since I first saw it in 1980. Here he seems hammy, almost amateurish, surprisingly bad, especially alongside this exquisitely controlled English actor.

That wasn't Jesse's great moment, though; he chose the scene where the little boy steals into Jack's bedroom early in the morning to retrieve a toy only to find his father sitting on the side of the bed with the thousand-yard stare. He summons his son over, who sits uneasily on his lap. Looking at his father's unshaven face and bleary eyes—in a blue dressing gown Nicholson's as pale as a corpse—the little boy asks him why he doesn't go to sleep.

After a beat comes the chilling response: “I've got too much to do.” Meaning, we intuit, chop up his family just like the waiter did.

“That's it,” Jesse whispered. “Can we play it again?”

We watched
Annie Hall
(1977) for, among other reasons, the scene where Diane Keaton sings “Seems Like Old Times” in a dark bar. Keaton is shot slightly from the side and appears to be looking at someone off-camera. It's a scene that gives me goosebumps—she seems to be singing the song, making its dramatic points with her eyes. It's also a moment of self-realization for her character, Annie Hall, a fledgling musician, who is taking apprehensive but certain first flight.

Some films let you down; you must have been in love or heartbroken, you must have been wound up about something when you saw them because now, viewed from a different trajectory, there's no magic left. I showed him
Around the World in
80
Days
(1956) which, with its glorious shot of a balloon floating over Paris at sunset, had knocked me out when I was his age but now seemed appallingly dated and silly.

But some films still do it, still give you a thrill years and years later. I showed Jesse
Mean Streets
(1973), a movie that Martin Scorsese made at the very beginning of his career. It's about growing up in New York's violent, macho Little Italy. There's a sequence near the beginning I've never forgotten. With the dramatic chords of the Rolling Stones' “Tell Me” in the background, the camera follows Harvey Keitel in his passage through a red-lit bar. Anyone who has gone into a favourite bar on a Friday night knows that moment. You know everyone, they wave, they call out your name, the whole night is before you. Keitel snakes his way through the crowd, shaking hands here, exchanging a joke there; he's dancing slowly, just in the hip, to the music; it's a portrait of a young man in love with life, in love with being alive on this Friday night with these people in this place. It also bears the signature of a young filmmaker's joy, a moment of transport, when he's doing it, he's actually
making a movie
.

There were other great moments, Gene Hackman rousting a bar in
The French Connection
(1971). “Popeye's here!” he cries, rushing down the counter, pill bottles, switchblades, joints hitting the floor. There's Charles Grodin's double take in
Ishtar
(1987) when Dustin Hoffman asks him if Libya is “near here.” Or Marlon Brando's monologue in
Last Tango in Paris
(1972) about a dog named Dutchie who used to “jump up and look around for rabbits” in a mustard field. We watched
Last Tango
late at night, a candle burning on the table, and at the end of the scene I could see Jesse's dark eyes staring over at me.

“Yep,” I said.

There's Audrey Hepburn on the fire escape of a brownstone Manhattan apartment in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
(1961), her hair wrapped in an after-shower towel, her fingers gently strumming a guitar. The camera takes it all in, the stairwell, the bricks, the slim woman, then changes to a medium tight shot, just Audrey, then blam, a full close-up, her face fills the screen, those porcelain cheekbones, the sharp chin, the brown eyes. She stops strumming and looks up, surprised, at somebody off-camera. “Hi,” she says softly. That's one of those moments people go to movies for; you see it once, no matter at what age, you never forget it. It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defences and really break your heart.

I sat smitten as the credits rolled, the theme song fading, but I sensed a reserve on Jesse's part, as if he was reluctant to walk across a carpet in muddy shoes, so to speak.

“What?” I said.

“It's a peculiar movie,” he said, suppressing a yawn, something he sometimes did when he was uncomfortable.

“How so?”

“It's about a pair of prostitutes. But the movie itself doesn't seem to know that. It seems to think it's about something sort of sweet and nutty.” Here he laughed. “I don't mean to be disrespectful about something you really like—”

“No, no,” I said defensively. “I don't really like it. I like
her
.” I went on to say that Truman Capote, who wrote the novella the movie was based on, never liked the casting of Audrey Hepburn. “He thought Holly Golightly was more of a tomboy, more of a Jodie Foster type.”