My Salinger Year, about an awkward girl learning the ropes at a literary agency, is as shallow as a glossy magazine.
Canada/USA
3*
Director:
Philippe Falardeau
Screenwriter:
Philippe Falardeau
Director of Photography:
Sara Mishara
Running time: 100 minutes
She has never read Catcher in the Rye but worships its elusive author, J.D. Salinger. She wants to be a writer but rarely puts pen to paper. She never learns any hard lessons but is constantly on the verge of tears. Her name is Joanna, and she is a mess, a bit like the movie she stars in, called My Salinger Year.
In the mid-1990s, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) is fresh off a degree in English literature and has published two poems in the Paris Review. On the spur of the moment, she decides to put her studies at Berkeley on hold, break up with her boyfriend and move to – rather, stay on in, as she is the kind of person whom things happen to rather than the one who makes them happen – New York City. She wants to become a writer, but in the meantime, she has to pay the bills, so she contacts a recruitment agency.
Like a godsend or just a magnificent manifestation of serendipity, she immediately lands an interview with the serene but mostly expressionless Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), an agent who always seems to be moving in slow motion. Joanna is told that she will spend her days typing out dictation and answering the heaps of fan letters sent to her client, “Jerry” aka J.D. Salinger, by using rather impersonal form letters. Under no circumstances is she to write on her own, at all.
Of course, she ignores this advice, but not in the way we might expect. She doesn’t appear to write much, except a line of poetry here and there, which we never hear or read. No, she is so filled with her own sense of importance and a naïve Messiah complex that she starts writing personal responses to the fan letters. Her own life is a disaster, but she wants to help others, most of whom are obsessed with Holden Caulfield (it seems those who admire Salinger’s other novels are much more balanced individuals), fix theirs.
In the meantime, director Philippe Falardeau spends an inordinate amount of time trying to cram his screenplay full of retrospective comedy about the time period, particularly as far as the then-nascent internet technology is concerned. Somehow, while this is 1995, Margaret is still afraid of bringing a computer into the office. When a PC does appear, everyone is told it should be used to track down Catcher in the Rye facsimiles on the World Wide Web. And people gossip about how silly e-mails are and how they are, fingers crossed, just a passing fad… Har har.
But then, despite her plain incompetence at the job, Joanna receives more and more responsibilities from Margaret, who cannot be a fool because, after all, she represents the mythical Salinger. Joanna even starts chatting to “Jerry” over the phone, who encourages her to write every day. We never see her following his advice, but by the end of the story, she suddenly has a collection of poetry ready to be submitted to that pinnacle of excellence in the realm of the printed word, the New Yorker. She might just be full of herself, but the film appears to be telling us that she has blossomed into a publishable author along the way (perhaps via osmosis through her connection, however tangential, with literary greatness?).
We never figure out what is going on in Joanna’s head because she appears to be a teenage girl trapped in a 20-something wannabe poet’s body. She has told herself that she will be a writer one day, but this film provides no blueprint or development that would allow her to reach that goal. Very little drama is on display. Even when things get heated (for example, when a teenage Salinger fan, much more mature than her, comes to the office and gives her a good dressing down), she simply persists with her juvenile rebellion by continuing to write non-form letters to the fans.
The decision to present Salinger as an enigma (his face is never clearly shown) deserves some praise, as does the long single take at the end of the film that turns out to be a dream, but Qualley never rises to the challenge of infusing her character with more than a deer-lost-in-the-headlights quality.
My Salinger Year, which is lit so brightly that even the night-time scenes feel like they are taking place at high noon, is the ultimate feel-good Hallmark Channel film. At least the similar-in-the-broadest-outlines The Devil Wears Prada had two strong intriguing central characters, but Falardeau’s film has none, despite a last-ditch effort to inject some drama into Weaver’s character, Margaret. And at a major moment towards the end of the film, when Margaret reveals to Joanna that she knew the latter would make a fabulous agent the first time she laid eyes on her, it is difficult not to wonder whether Margaret has lost her marbles.
Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.