The Film Club (18 page)

“I saw Chloë a few times after that; she was pretty flirty but she was still with Morgan. I'd be standing at the bar and I'd feel a hand on my behind and I'd turn around and I'd see this blond-haired girl walking away from me. I asked Morgan once, I asked him how he'd feel about me asking her out and he said, ‘Fine, I don't care. I just like sleeping with her, that's all.' Except that's not the word he used.”

“I bet.”

“But I was super careful never to come on to her. I didn't want Morgan laughing at me, saying, ‘I don't even
want
her and you can't get her.'”

“Nice.”

“So.” He looked across the street as if to gather himself, to get the footing necessary to do justice to this new instalment. “Last weekend I went to a bar down on Queen Street. It was like that scene in
Mean Streets
. I'd just had a shower and washed my hair and I had all new clothes on and I felt really good. And I went into the bar and there was this song playing I really like and I felt like I could just get
anything
I wanted in the whole world. And there was Chloë; she'd come back for the weekend. She was sitting at a table with her friends and they all went, ‘Ooooo, Chloë, look who's here!'

“So I went over and kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘Hi, Chloë.' I didn't stick around, though. I went to the end of the bar and had a drink by myself. In a little while she came over; she said, ‘Come outside and have a cigarette with me.'

“We went outside; we sat on the railing in front of the bar and I said it, just like that, I said, ‘I'd really like to kiss you.'

“And she said, ‘Really?'

“I said, ‘Yeah.'

“And then she said, ‘What about Morgan?'

“‘I'll take care of Morgan,' I said.”

“So did he find out?”

“I told him the next day. He said (Jesse lowering his voice an octave), ‘Whatever, I don't care.' But that night we went out for a beer after work and he got really drunk, really fast, and said, ‘You think you're so bad 'cause you're with Chloë now, don't you?'

“But he called me the next morning; it was sort of sad, sort of courageous too, and said, ‘Look, man, I'm just feeling a bit weird about you being with her.'

“And I said, ‘Yeah, me too.'”

He lit a cigarette, holding it on the other side of the chair from me.

“That's a hell of a story,” I said (the laundry stirring in the soft breeze). He sat back, staring straight ahead, imagining God knows what, Lamaze classes with Chloë, touring with Eminem.

“Do you figure that Morgan and I will survive this? I mean our friendship. You and Arthur Cramner survived.”

“I have to be honest with you, Jesse. Women can be a bit of a blood sport.”

“How so?” he said. He wanted to talk about Chloë Stanton-McCabe some more. The story had been too quick in the telling.

It was a good summer for both of us. I got work here and there (it seemed to be gathering momentum), a few television guest shots, a trip to Halifax for a radio book show, another interview with David Cronenberg, a piece for a men's magazine that got me to Manhattan . I wasn't breaking even, more money was going out than coming in, but I no longer had the feeling that I was leaking money, that something sad, even tragic awaited me five years down the road.

And then something happened that felt like the period at the end of a sentence. It made me feel that my bad luck had run its course. To the eyes of an outsider, it was no big deal. I was invited to write a film review for a national newspaper. The pay was low, it was a one-shot gig, but—how to explain this—it was something I had always wanted to do. Sometimes these things have a lure well beyond their actual value, like an academic wanting to give a lecture at the Sorbonne or an actor being in a movie with Marlon Brando. (Maybe it's a terrible movie. Doesn't really matter.)

Jesse was working the evening shift. He was still a prep man, washing and cutting up vegetables, cleaning squid, but sometimes they let him work the grill, which had the same slightly disproportionate lure that my film review did. These things are dismayingly arbitrary.

Grill guys are tough, very macho; they like to sweat and swear and drink and work impossible hours and talk about “pussy” and “welfare bums.” Now Jesse was one of them. He liked sitting around in his whites after his shift—it was his favourite time—smoking cigarettes and rehashing the night, how they got slammed just after nine (a load of customers arriving all at once), how they'd put a waitress in “the penalty box” (delayed her orders). It doesn't pay to fool with the boys in white.

There was a kind of strange, pseudo-gay banter in the kitchen—all kitchens, he said—guys calling each other fags, who takes it up the ass, etc., etc. The one thing you couldn't call someone was an “asshole.” That was serious, that was a real insult.

He liked it when Chloë picked him up after work, this Marilyn Monroe with a diamond stud in her nose. All the guys sitting around, noticing.

“Do you like her?” he asked me one night, his face very close to mine.

“Yes,” I said.

“You're hesitating.”

“No, not at all. I think she's terrific.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

A moment's thought. “If she broke up with me, would you say that?”

“I'd take your side.”

“What do you mean?”

“That means I'd say whatever I had to say to make you feel better.”

Pause. “Do you think she's going to break up with me?”

“Jesse. Jesus.”

We watched movies but not so often now. Maybe two a week, sometimes less. It felt as if the world was pulling us both from the living room and I had a feeling that something precious was coming to its natural conclusion.
Fin
de jeu
. The white ribbon.

I introduced a “Buried Treasures” program.

I showed him Robert Redford's
Quiz Show
(1994), which gets better, richer, every time you see it. It's the story of a handsome, charming university professor, Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), who gets caught up in the game-show scandals of the '50s where contestants, it turned out, were given the answers ahead of time. Like the fixing of the World Series in 1919, it was a stab in the heart of a naive but trusting American public. That one of their golden boys—and the son of a pre-eminent scholar, Mark Van Doren (played by the great Paul Scofield)—should be in on it made the wound more painful.

Like
The Great Gatsby
,
Quiz Show
takes you into a morally slippery world but makes it so beautiful you understand why people go there in the first place and why they choose to stay there. I directed Jesse's attention to the terrific chemistry between Rob Morrow, who plays the congressional investigator, and Ralph Fiennes, who says yes, once, to something he should say no to.

Some of the best acting in the film, the most powerful moments, comes here from Ralph Fiennes's eyes. (For some scenes, it seems as if he might even be carrying some extra eye makeup.) I suggest to Jesse that he wait for an exchange when someone asks Fiennes how “Honest Abe Lincoln” would do on a television game show. Watch what Fiennes does with his eyes. Watch how they move about when he's talking to Rob Morrow: there's a kind of peeka-boo quality; he keeps looking at the young man as if he's saying softly to himself, How much does he know? How much does he know?

There's a sequence when they're playing poker: Fi-ennes makes his bet and Morrow says, “I know you're lying.” You can almost hear Fiennes's heart beating when he responds with almost breathless paranoia, “You mean bluffing, the word is bluffing.” He reminds you of Raskol-nikov in Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
.

“Do you ever miss being on television?” Jesse asked when the movie was over.

“Sometimes,” I said. I explained that I missed the money, but what I really missed was having a dozen utterly superficial, thirty-second conversations with people I hardly knew. “That can put a little sparkle in your day,” I said, “believe it or not.”

“But do you actually miss being
on television
?”

“No. I never miss that. Do you?”

“Do I miss having a dad who's on TV? No, I don't. I never even think about it.”

And with that he got up and wandered upstairs, his physical carriage, the casualness of his movements—for the moment anyway—no longer that of a teenager.

More Buried Treasures. Like eating banana-cream pie right out of the fridge. (Never mind getting a plate.)
The
Last Detail
(1973). “Here are five reasons,” I said, “why we love Jack Nicholson.”

1. Because, in his words, “It's not hard to make it to the top. What's hard is staying there.” Jack's been making movies for thirty-five years. Nobody can be “just lucky” or fake it that long. You've got to be great.

2. I love that Jack Nicholson plays a detective—for a significant part of
Chinatown
—with a bandage on his nose.

3. I love that moment in
The Shining
when Jack catches his wife reading the demented pages of his novel and asks her: “Do you like it?”

4. I love the fact that Jack waited until he was fifty before taking up golf.

5. I love it when Jack slaps his gun on the bar in
The
Last Detail
and says, “I
am
the motherfucking shore patrol!”

Some critics think Nicholson's finest performance, ever, is in
The Last Detail
. He plays “Badass” Buddusky, a cigar-smoking, obscenity-spewing navy lifer—a very excitable guy—who pulls a gig escorting a kid across the country to jail. Jack wants to show him a good time, “get him drunk and get him laid” before his sentence begins.

When the film came out, Roger Ebert wrote that Nicholson “creates a character so complete and so complex that we stop thinking about the movie and just watch to see what he'll do next.” Some movies bring swearing to an art form. Remember the gunnery sergeant in
Full
Metal Jacket
(1987)? Like eggs, the F-word can be made into a lot of variations and you hear a lot of them in
The
Last Detail
. Studio executives wanted to cool down the script before it got in front of the cameras. They were horrified by the sheer number of expletives and they suspected, correctly, that Jack Nicholson was going to spit them out with particular relish. Recalls one Columbia executive: “In the first seven minutes, there were 342 fucks. At Columbia, we couldn't have that kind of language, we couldn't have sex.”

Robert Towne (
Chinatown
, 1974), who wrote the screenplay, said, “If you made love for Columbia Pictures, it had to be at 300 yards distance. But movies were opening up and this was an opportunity to write navy guys like they really talked. The head of the studio sat me down and said, Bob, wouldn't
twenty
‘motherfuckers' be more effective than
forty
‘motherfuckers'? I said no, this is the way people talk when they're powerless to act. They bitch.” Towne dug his heels in. Nicholson backed him up—and since Jack was the biggest star around, that was the end of that.

Picking movies for people is a risky business. In a way it's as revealing as writing someone a letter. It shows how you think, it shows what moves you, sometimes it can even show how you think the world sees
you
. So when you breathlessly recommend a film, when you say, “Oh, this is a scream, you're going to really love it,” it's a nauseating experience when a friend sees you the following day and says with a wrinkled brow, “You thought that was
funny
?”

I remember once recommending
Ishtar
(1987) to a woman I quite fancied only to have her shoot me that look the next time I saw her. Oh, it said,
that's
what you're like.

So over the years I've learned to keep my mouth shut in video stores where sometimes I crave to call out warnings to complete strangers, where I want to snatch the movie out of their hands and assure their startled faces that this other movie, the one over here, is a better choice. I have, however, a few standbys, movies I've recommended that have never, ever come back to bite me.
The Late Show
(1977) is one of them. I picked it next.

It's a simple thriller about a broken-down private detective (Art Carney) and a daffy young psychic (Lily Tomlin) who get caught up in a string of murders in Los Angeles. Even though the film is nearly forty years old, practically no one seems to have seen it. But when they do, at least the people I've pushed toward it, they all respond with a kind of delighted surprise and gratitude. In some cases, I think it's even led people to re-evaluate what they thought of me personally.

When I was preparing
The Late Show
for Jesse, I came across Pauline Kael's original review in the 1977
New
Yorker
. She loved it but couldn't quite place it. “It's not exactly a thriller,” she wrote, “it's a one of a kind movie, a love hate poem to sleaziness.”

The Friends of Eddie Coyle
came and went very quickly back in 1973. You still can't find it in video stores, not even in the little specialty stores where they stock horror movies from Finland. It was directed by Peter Yates (
Bullitt
), but the real reason to see it is for that sleepy-eyed wizard, Robert Mitchum, who plays the small-time crook Eddie Coyle. We all know somebody like Eddie, a guy born to make the wrong decision. Uncle Vanya as a repeat offender.

As time goes by, Robert Mitchum seems to get better and better—that barrel chest, the deep voice, his way of drifting through a movie with the effortlessness of a cat wandering into a dinner party. He had so much talent, and yet, weirdly, it gave him some kind of bullying pleasure to deny it. “I got three expressions,” he used to say, “look right, look left and straight ahead.” Charles Laughton, who directed him in
Night of the Hunter
(1955), said all that gruff Baby, I don't care stuff was an act. Robert Mitchum, he said, was literate, gracious, kind, a man who spoke beautifully and would have made the best Macbeth of any actor living. Mitchum put it another way: “The difference between me and other actors is that I've spent more time in jail.”