BEFORE: Damn, is it me or is September going by very quickly? I mean, it's half over already! I'll have a quick break in 10 or 11 days, then jump into my October films, but three weeks into THAT month I'll be going on vacation for a week, and then when I get back and finish the month's horror movies, I'll only have 15 movies to go before Year 10 is over! Time seems to have sped up somehow, I guess it's because I'm very busy during the week setting up screenings of an animated feature in "select cities" (the ones that request it) around the country, plus trying to get rewards made and sent out for TWO different Kickstarter campaigns! On top of that, I have to try to qualify a short film for this year's Oscars, so the work days really whiz by, and I never seem to have enough time to get everything done. You'd think that being around movie production all day long, I wouldn't want to spend my nights watching other movies, but the schedule is the schedule. As long as there are films coming up on the schedule that I'm excited about, I'll keep on keepin' on.
Zoey Deutch carries over from "Everybody Wants Some!!" and she'll be here tomorrow, too.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "On the Road" (Movie #2,958), "Hemingway & Gellhorn" (Movie #2,965)
THE PLOT: The life of celebrated but reclusive author J.D. Salinger, who gained worldwide fame with the publication of his novel "The Catcher in the Rye".
AFTER: I'm considering this film as the third in a trilogy this year, having watched films about two other prominent male writers, Jack Kerouac in the thinly-veiled autobiographical story "On the Road", and that HBO biopic about Ernest Hemingway. I'm not exactly sure if all of these writers wrote about the same things - I've read works by Hemingway, but not anything by the other two. Yep, that's right, I've never read the manifesto for disaffected sullen teens, "The Catcher in the Rye". But I felt I shouldn't let that stop me from watching a film about Salinger. I'm going to pause a minute here, after watching the film, and read the Wiki synopsis about the book.
Eh, consider me unimpressed. It's just a story about a kid that got expelled from his prep school, then spends three days wandering around New York City before going back to his parents' house for Christmas break. He gets jealous when a dorm-mate dates a girl he was interested in, he checks into an NYC hotel and dances with some tourist women, dates a girl named Sally, goes out for drinks with his friend Carl, and visits his old English teacher before spending time with his young sister. He takes his sister to the Central Park Zoo and a carousel while dreaming about heading west to work at a gas station. Big freakin' deal, how is this considered the greatest novel of the 20th century?
Maybe you have to read it to appreciate it. Maybe it kicked off this whole teen angst and alienation thing, which has pretty much lasted until this day (just look at "The Edge of Seventeen", Nadine shares some DNA with Holden Caufield. I'm sure Salinger shared even more DNA, since Holden was his creation and no doubt based on himself - but supposedly the novel is about Salinger's reaction to the trauma of serving in World War II, and I'm just not picking up any of that from the book's plot.
This biopic focuses on how serving in that war changed Salinger's attitude about life, and for a long while after returning home, he found himself unable to write. But he didn't seem to have any problem writing during college, as seen in the earlier parts of the film. To this film's credit, it's a full hour or so of screen time before we're subjected to the stupid stereotypical image of a writer sitting at a typewriter, staring at a blank page. So, he had no idea for a story, but still sat down in front of the typewriter and loaded up a page? This never makes ANY sense. A writer would, I'm guessing, probably first formulate an idea, jot down some pencilled notes and maybe write a few sample paragraphs BEFORE sitting down at the typewriter. Would you start driving your car if you had no idea where you were about to go? Would you turn your oven on before you knew what you wanted to cook? Of course not.
Whether it really happened this way or not, at least this film showcases a writer's method for getting over writer's block - because as I've said many times in this space, watching a writer write is barely interesting, and watching a writer NOT able to write is even less so. But here Salinger investigates Zen meditation with some kind of Buddhist guru, who suggests that if he can't write anything good, he should just type up something bad, and then take comfort in the satisfying act of tearing up the paper. (Nobody really knows why we tear up papers that we're about to throw away, but for some reason, we just do.). Before long, he's bragging about the previous day, where he tore up a full five pages, and then comes to realize that in order to do that, he managed to WRITE five pages, good or not. It's a neat trick.
I also noticed that Salinger here faced some of the same problems that I saw, over and over, during the rock music documentary chain. All of those singers and bands practiced and gigged for years in order to create a hit record, and then when they finally got a hit record, it was the end of one struggle, but also the beginning of another. Then they had to go on tour, deal with crazy fans, and endure pressure from their record company to promote one hit record and also create more just like it. And that becomes the big, crazy, hamster-wheel of fame: record, promote, tour, repeat.
So maybe J.D. Salinger was like the first big rock star author. He certainly endured pressure from his editors to fix THIS here, give THIS story a happy ending, do THIS press interview to sell some more books, and on many levels, this became the antithesis to creativity, rather than the engine driven by it. He also had more than his share of crazy fans, ones that would turn up at his house claiming to be so moved by his story that they felt THEY were the real Holden Caufield. Perhaps his story of the detached prep-school kid who hated everyone and everything struck too big of a chord with the audience, or perhaps it just held a certain fascination for the craziest elements of society. Either way, it drove Salinger into becoming a recluse, living off the grid in New Hampshire - which did remove many distractions in his life enabling him to write more, but it also convinced him to write only for himself in the future, and not for his crazy fans.
The famous expression says that "a writer writes", but it doesn't say anything about a writer getting published. That's not a given, just as making films comes with no guarantee that they'll get distributed, or playing sports comes with no guarantees of winning any championships. We all roll the dice with our chosen professions, and hope that somehow the path we choose will lead to success in some way. But if it does lead to success, that may lead to happiness, or else it may lead one to start to formulate an escape plan. There's just no telling.
Based on the plot of "Catcher in the Rye", it feels like this film did a lot of reverse-engineering to show elements of Salinger's life that could have inspired the novel. Whether any of this really happened in Salinger's life is probably a matter of guesswork or interpretation.
Also starring Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Kevin Spacey (last seen in "Heartburn"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "The Post"), Brian d'Arcy James (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Victor Garber (last seen in "Self/Less"), Hope Davis (last seen in "Proof"), Lucy Boynton (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), James Urbaniak (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Adam Busch (last seen in "American Dreamz"), Jefferson Mays (last seen in "Alfie"), Eric Bogosian (last seen in "Dolores Claiborne"), Bernard White, Will Rogers (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Caitlin Mehner, Francesca Root-Dodson, Tim Dougherty
RATING: 5 out of 10 rejection letters
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