Home schooling with Truffaut, Eszterhas and Hitchcock

Jesse Gilmour's grades began to "wobble" in ninth grade; they "toppled over" in 10th grade. His divorced parents didn't know what to do. Finally, Jesse's father, David, came up with an unconventional idea: Jesse could quit school if he agreed to watch three movies a week with his dad, "The Film Club" of the book's title.

Why films? For one thing, Jesse had few interests, though "he likes to watch movies." And David, a novelist and once a "rather glib film critic for a [Canadian] television show," hoped to engage him in something.

Understandably, the senior Gilmour had reservations about the plan. "What if I'm wrong?" he thought. "What if I'm being hip at the expense of my son and letting him ruin his life?" In the material provided to reviewers with advance copies of the book, Gilmour writes, "I wondered if I created a glib disastrous life precedent for him: Hey if you don't like something, quit!"

Also in the same advance material and with more passion and emotion than I sensed in the book, he thinks to himself: "I'm losing him. Something's got to be done. It was like he was dying right in front of me." So, despite doubts, Gilmour moved forward.

The sessions began with François Truffaut ("The 400 Blows") and Joe Eszterhas ("Basic Instinct") "for dessert," and continued for about three years. In many sessions, David offered fascinating insights into the films, frequently urging his son to find parallels between the characters' actions and his own. However, the films don't seem to have an immediate impact. In fact, it seems as if the two spent as much time talking about Jesse's romantic problems -- especially with one toxic young lady -- as they did discussing cinema. But films weren't really the point.

They "simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as a door-opener for all manner of conversations."

One day, Jesse told David, no more movies. He returned to school and earned a high school equivalency in short order. According to the book's publicist, he went on to attend college and recently quit to study filmmaking in Prague. So all's well that ends well, right? If so, why was I annoyed the entire time I read?

Bad grades weren't Jesse's only problem. The cops brought him home one evening after catching him spray-painting his former elementary school. There were other hints of trouble: Part of the film-club deal was no drugs. "Any drugs and the deal's off. ... I'll drop a [expletive] house on you if you start in with that stuff," David told his son.

David and his former wife, Maggie, uprooted their lives to try to help. They switched abodes, believing that a male authority figure might help, and David become the primary caregiver. They put Jesse in a private school.

But why didn't they try conventional therapy? And what was David thinking when he sealed the film-club deal with his son over a bottle of wine? Jesse was 16; the minimum drinking age in Canada is 18. And what did David do when a lovelorn Jesse violated the "no-drugs" deal? He planned a showing of Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street."

I'm a parent. I know kids don't come with owner's manuals or tech support. You have to do the best you can. But Gilmour was playing with fire. He's lucky he didn't get burned.

Curt Schleier of New Jersey is an emergency medical technician and volunteer ambulance driver. He also reviews for the Kansas City Star and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.