“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 ma
ke 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.”
As we watched these films though, I sometimes had the feeling that Jesse’s presence was somehow more dutiful than before. Thirty minutes into Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), I could tell by his physical posture, the telltale leaning on his elbow, that the film bored him, and I began to have the suspicion that he was watching it for my sake, to keep me company.
“Guess who the cameraman on Stardust was,” I said.
“Who?” he said.
“The Prince of Darkness.”
“Gordon Willis?”
“Same guy who shot The Godfather.”
“Same guy who shot Klute,” he rimed in absently.
After a diplomatic pause, I said gently, “I don’t think he shot Klute.”
“Same guy.”
I said, “I’ll bet you five bucks that Gordon Willis did not shoot Klute.”
He was a graceful winner, no gloating, when he lifted his bum off the couch to slip the money into his back pocket, his eyes not meeting mine. “I always thought Michael Ballhaus shot Klute,” I said milkily.
“I can see that,” he said. “Maybe you’re thinking of those early Fassbinder flicks. They’re kind of grainy.”
I stared at him until he looked up. “What?” he said. Knowing perfectly well “what.”
13
Fall. 2005. Chinatown. Chloë, having changed her major to Business Administration, went back to school in Kingston, Ontario. Shortly thereafter Jesse announced he wanted to quit his restaurant job and go up north to write music for a month with a friend of his, a guitar player I barely knew. The guy’s father was an entertainment lawyer and had a big house on Lake Couchiching. A boat, too. They could stay there, rent free. Get jobs as dishwashers in a local restaurant. What did I think? It wasn’t really a question, we both knew that. I said, sure.
And then, like that, he was gone. I thought, Well, he’s nineteen, that’s the way it goes. At least he knows that Michael Curtiz shot two endings for Casablanca in case the sad one didn’t work out. That’s bound to help him out there in the world. Can’t ever be said now that I sent forth my son defenceless.
For the first time, the blue room on the third floor in Chinatown was empty. It was as if someone had sucked all the life out of the house. But then, by around the second week, I started to like it. No mess in the kitchen, no sticky finger stains on the fridge handle, nobody crashing up the stairs at three in the morning.
Occasionally he phoned home, mildly dutiful calls, the trees were bare, the lake was cold but the job was fine; everything else was pretty good. They were writing lots of songs. Lying in the boat at night, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the stars, his friend strumming a guitar. Maybe he and Joel (that was the guitar player’s name) were going to get an apartment when they got back to town. Chloë was coming up one of these weekends.
Then one day (people on bicycles with gloves again), the phone rang and I heard Jesse’s voice. Shaky, like a man who can’t find himself in the present, like ice sliding out from under your feet.
“I just got canned,” he said.
“From your job?”
“No. Chloë. She just canned me.”
They’d been bickering on the phone (his directionless life, his loser friends; “waiters and airport personnel” she called them). Somebody crashed the phone down on somebody. Usually she called back. (This had happened before.) But not this time.
A few days passed. On the third morning, a bright, copper-leafed day in the country, he woke up certain, as certain as if he had seen it in a movie, that she’d found another boyfriend.
“So I called her cellphone,” he said. “She didn’t answer. It was eight o’clock in the morning.” Not a good development, I thought, but said nothing.
He phoned her during the day from the restaurant kitchen; left several messages. Please call. Will pay long-distance charges. All the while this conviction, this certainty growing like an ink stain throughout his body that something very serious was happening, that he was standing on ground he had never stood on before.
Finally near ten o’clock that night, she called him back. He could hear noise in the background. Music, muffled voices. Where was she? In a bar.
“She called you back from a bar?” I said.
He asked her if there was anything wrong; he could barely find his voice. Like talking to a stranger. “We have some things to talk about,” she said. Indistinguishable words. It sounded, he wasn’t sure, as if she’d put her hand over the mouthpiece and ordered a martini from the bartender.
He didn’t waste time (he’s always impressed me that way), and went straight to it. He said, “Are you breaking up with me?”
“Yes,” she said.
Then he made a mistake. He hung up on her. Hung up and waited for her to call back in tears. He paced back and forth in the living room of this cottage up north, staring at the phone. Talking out loud to her. But no ring. He called her back. He said, “What’s going on here?”
Then she did her part. She’d been thinking about it, she said, they weren’t right for each other; she was young, she was going to university, she was on the cusp of “an exciting future in the workforce.” One cliché after another, all delivered in this new, girl-on-the-go voice; he’d heard traces of it before, but now it didn’t make him want to strangle her, it made him frightened of her.
He said, “You’re going to regret this, Chloë.”
“Maybe,” she said breezily.
He said, “That’s it then, I am out of your life.”
“And you know what she said then, Dad? She said, ‘Bye-bye, Jesse.’ She said my name, real softly. It just broke my heart hearing her say my name like that, ‘Bye-bye, Jesse.’”
His friend, Joel, came in later that night after his shift in the kitchen. Jesse told him the story.
“Really?” Joel said. He listened for about ten minutes, threading new strings onto his acoustic guitar, and then, or so it seemed, lost interest and wanted to talk about something else.
“Did you get any sleep?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, sounding surprised by the question. I could tell he wanted something from me but at the same time knew there was nothing I could give him, except a direction in which to blow the poison that had been collecting in his body over the last forty-eight hours.
Finally I said (uselessly), “I wish I could help you.”
Then he started to talk. I can’t remember what he said, it’s not important, it was just talk and talk and talk.
“Maybe you should come home,” I said.
“I don’t know.”
I said, “Can I give you some advice?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t go on a drug or drinking binge. Have a few beers, I know you feel terrible, but if you go on a binge, you’re going to wake up in the morning and you’ll think you’re in hell.”
“I already do,” he said with a rueful laugh.
“Trust me,” I said, “it can get a whole lot worse.”
“I hope you still love me.”
“Of course I do.”
Pause. “Do you think she’s got a new boyfriend?”
“I have no idea, honey. I don’t think so, though.”
“How come?”
“How come what?”
“How come you think she doesn’t have a new boyfriend?”
“It’d just be rather fast, that’s all.”
“Guys hit on her all the time.”
“That’s not the same thing as her going home with them.” I regretted the choice of words as soon as I said them. They opened the curtain on a fresh screen of images. But he had already moved on to the next thought.
“You know what I’m afraid of?” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
“No,” he said, “really afraid of.”
“What?”
“I’m afraid she’s going to sleep with Morgan.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It sounds like she’s finished with him.”
“It wouldn’t bother me so much if it was someone else.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But I’d feel really terrible if it was Morgan.”
There was a long pause. I could see him in that country house, the lake deserted, the trees bare, a crow cawing in the forest.
“Maybe you should come home.”
Another long, thoughtful pause in which I could feel him imagining horrible things. He said, “Can we talk a little longer?”
“Sure,” I said. “I got all day.”
Sometimes when the phone rang late at night, I hesitated for a second. I wondered if I was up to it, to be in the presence of his unfixable agony. Sometimes I thought, I won’t answer. I’ll do it tomorrow. But then I remembered Paula Moors and those scary winter mornings when I woke up too early, the whole terrible day yawning in my face.
“Do you remember saying that Chloë bored you sometimes?” I said to him one night on the phone.
“Did I say that?”
“You said you were afraid to travel with her because she might bore you on the plane. You told me you used to hold the phone away from your ear because you couldn’t listen to her careerist prattle any longer.”
“I can’t remember ever feeling like that.”
“You did. That was the truth of it.”
The Film Club Page 14