Screen icon Sigourney Weaver delights as the boss of a wide-eyed wannabe poet in My Salinger Year, an adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s bestselling coming-of-age memoir, which orbits around the reclusive author.
A bright and eager-to-please white girl with big Rory Gilmore energy, Joanna (Margaret Qualley, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood) has dropped out of college to experience the romance of trying to make it as a writer in mid-90s New York City — but needs a gig to pay the bills.
Without much fuss, she finds herself employed as an assistant at a small but prestigious literary agency whose wood-panelled walls are lined with portraits of former clients like Agatha Christie and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and where her duties include responding to letters sent to “Jerry” Salinger with a cold form letter — thanks, but no thanks — before running them through a shredder.
In 1951 J.D. Salinger released Catcher in the Rye, an instant classic of teenage angst and alienation that inspired adoration in its admirers. Fifteen years later, he’d fled New York for New Hampshire, become increasingly sequestered inside his home — at one point constructing a literal wall around the property — and stopped publishing altogether.
By the 90s, he was one of the last living truly famous novelists, and his agents were responsible for responding to his still-copious fan mail.
Here, that task falls to Joanna.
The film follows recent Salinger-themed misfires — the Nicholas Hoult-starring biopic Rebel in the Rye and Shane Salerno’s tawdry 2013 documentary — but it looks beyond the mysterious author (played here by Tim Post), who hovers in the wings for much of the film, occasionally thrilling everyone at the office by ringing up for a doddering, friendly chat.
Rather, My Salinger Year is a familiar tale of a 20-something woman ‘finding herself’ in the big city.
Perhaps because Rakoff’s book was written 20 years after her time at the agency, the film thankfully recognises the cliches it trades in. “Isn’t that what aspiring writers did? Live in cheap apartments and write in cafes… yeah, I know,” Joanna narrates.
The arrival of her boyfriend Don (Douglas Booth, The Dirt) — an amusing caricature of a nice-guy douchebag who works at a socialist bookshop and writes his novel naked at his desk in their ratty Brooklyn apartment — happily suggests the film doesn’t take itself as seriously as it first appears.
The light drama motors along pleasantly enough, with writer-director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) treating the source material playfully, rupturing any surface realism by inventing sequences in which a number of Salinger fans recite their letters direct to camera, in order to map the wider impact of Salinger’s books across class, generational and racial lines.
These scenes could play as an ode to the timeless power of great fiction. Unfortunately, the letters are simply rather dull. (There’s nothing here as pure as Tom Cruise’s sports agent emulating the Catcher in the Rye cover for his mission statement in Cameron Crowe’s mid-90s rom-com, Jerry Maguire.)
The same could be said of Joanna.
We’re told that she’s published a few poems in the Paris Review, and the narrative falls somewhat predictably, if comfortingly, into the arc of the young artist discovering their voice — especially when Joanna defies orders and starts writing back to some of the fans.
But it’s hard to believe that this young writer, who seems stuck in a cushioned adolescence, has any real hunger, or an original voice fighting to get out. (By contrast, Marielle Heller’s excellent Can You Ever Forgive Me? saw a writer truly come into her own, delivering devilish lines worthy of those she was mimicking.)
It’s a shame, because Qualley’s run since her 2016 breakout role in The Nice Guys — most notably as a barefoot Manson Family member luring Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino’s latest — has shown that she can do more than politely smile.
She throws her heart into a bland performance of lit-girl sincerity, gliding through the office in a polka-dotted blouse and neat middle part, and feeling totally at odds with the film’s underlying attraction to Salinger, whose stories lionise prodigiously gifted, self-described ‘freaks’ who have difficulty living in polite society.
Thank heavens, then, for Sigourney Weaver.
Playing Joanna’s employer Margaret, her towering presence is never less than commanding, a nod perhaps to her past terrific lady-boss roles — from the Machiavellian Katharine in Working Girl to the unstoppable Ripley in the Alien franchise.
From her grand entrance on Joanna’s first day on the job — wrapped in a chic white coat that matches the streak in her hair, blanking her new assistant as she saunters past waving a cigarette — she delivers a finely textured performance that combines comic timing with great pathos and power.
Beyond Margaret’s domineering behaviour, years of experience and wisdom shine through, imbuing the mentor relationship between the two women with a hard-won warmth that lifts it beyond The Devil Wears Prada comparisons the film has received (and connects to Falardeau’s other tale about a teacher, the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar).
Margaret is extra fascinating because she belongs to a glamorous world of New York publishing (recreated here in Montreal) that is fast fading from view — when business was played out over martini lunches, and authors were still celebrities (see, for example, the final sequence of Fellini’s Roma, in which Gore Vidal toasts the end of the world — as much a glittering part of the city as the rest of that fantasia).
This time of transition — or rather, imminent loss, depending on where you stand — is captured inside the office as the agency hilariously holds out against the digital revolution, stoically conducting their business on paper.
“We choose not to use computers,” Weaver declares with a straight face. Later, she peers at the box like it were one of the paranormal visitations she faces off against in Ghostbusters.
Wonderland of sort”.(Supplied: Palace Films)
The sense of a future rushing forward for which Margaret is unprepared gives the film some real flashes of poignancy, but with several clunky subplots transposed from the book, these ultimately get lost in the mix.
By contrast, Joanna’s dreams feel flimsy and banal. As she sets out with her portfolio of poems under her arm, ready to conquer the literary world, we’re left with the gnawing, Salinger-like sentiment: who really gives a damn?
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My Salinger Year is in cinemas January 14.
