Coming Through the Rye: Feeling Kind of Holden Caulfield

Catcher in the Rye is the sort of book impressionable angsty kids used to have to get over. Jamie Schwartz isn’t there yet. He is not a psycho-killer by any stretch, but he could probably use some counseling. He will head off on a quest to find his literary hero, J.D. Salinger, but he just might learn some important life lessons on the road in James Steven Sadwith’s Coming Through the Rye (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

The nebbish Schwartz would probably never fit in at his elitist Pennsylvania boarding school, but his notorious Salinger hero-worship only makes matters worse. However, his devotion also provides a creative outlet and a potential source of independent study credit when he adapts Catcher for the stage. The school might even mount the production, if he can just secure Salinger’s blessing. That will be quite a tall order, even in 1969. Still smarting from a recent bout of bullying, Schwartz goes AWOL, with the intention of following up a vague lead in New Hampshire. Fortunately, he is intercepted by Deedee, a more mature, but inexplicably smitten girl from the local high school.

Of course, Schwartz should be more interested in her than the airhead bombshell he has been carrying a torch for, but he will have to learn this the hard way. The impossibly patient Deedee will also play pop psychologist, teasing out painful family history Schwartz prefers to ignore and deny.

Frankly, Schwartz is sort of a big fat phony, but as annoying as he might be, Alex Wolff goes all in with a fully committed, irony-free performance. Plus, the romantic chemistry that slowly develops between him and Stefania LaVie Owen’s Deedee is unusually genuine and refreshingly chaste. In fact, Owen and the always reliable Chris Cooper, perfectly cast as Salinger, really elevate the predictable material. She just has that “It” factor that lights up the screen, whereas Cooper’s subtle discipline hints at Salinger’s artistic sensitivity buried underneath his protective Yankee reserve.

Rye is pretty well telegraphed every step of the way, but Sadwith, Wolff, Owen, and Cooper realize it with tremendous sensitivity. It is all very nice, but there is still something creepy about Schwartz’s Caulfield-mania for contemporary viewers. Incidentally, it also makes you wonder whatever happened to those five unpublished Salinger manuscripts that were supposed to be published posthumously in relatively short succession? Regardless, Coming Through the Rye is a small, earnest, and occasionally wise film Salinger and Cooper fans should appreciate when it opens tomorrow (10/14) in New York, at the Village East.

Salinger: The Man, the Myth, the Recluse

There will be no movie adaptations of The Catcher in the Rye.  The terms of J.D. Salinger’s literary trust are quite clear on that score.  However, the eagerly anticipated documentary profile of Holden Caulfield’s creator might be the next closest thing, considering how legions of admirers often intimately intertwine the character with Salinger.  Shane Salerno takes a remarkably even-handed look at the reclusive author and the events that shaped his life in the simply titled Salinger (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Essentially, most of what you have heard is true.  Salinger did not stop writing in 1965.  In conjunction with the documentary’s publicity campaign, news of five new Salinger works to be published beginning in 2015 has already been released.  Yes, readers might recognize some of the characters, but there is still more to Salinger the man and the film than that.

There are two main threads to Salerno’s years-in-the-making documentary.  One explores Salinger the recluse, arguing the author knowingly fueled the mystique that surrounded his withdrawal from public life.  Concurrently, Salerno also documents Salinger’s life, including his formative years spent in the army during WWII.  Experiencing D-Day, the liberation of Dachau, and the de-nazification campaign, Salinger saw more horrors that he never shook off.

To his credit, Salerno never seeks to defend or condemn Salinger.  He simply explains.  Given the context of his military experience and painful early romances, viewers can better understand how Salinger became such a figure of thorny complexity.  By the same token, Salerno never excuses Salinger’s more problematic behavior, such as his history of pursuing highly impressionable and considerably younger women (girls, really), only to treat them with cool detachment once they commenced a relationship.

Despite the paucity of Salinger photos and video, Salerno constructs a fully balanced, multi-dimensional portrait of the author.  He incorporates scores of talking head interviews, but most participants are heard from only briefly.  However, Salinger’s former companions (or what have you) Joyce Meynard and Jean Miller have sufficient time to tell their very personal stories.  Yet, perhaps the best sequences involve Salinger’s army buddies, with whom he remained on good terms throughout his life.

There are some over stylized flourishes to Salinger, but the early caper-like sequences capturing the attempts of both fans and journalists to track down the elusive writer effectively establish a mysterious mood, thereby setting the stage for the revelations to follow.  Always highly watchable, Salerno’s Salinger never feels like it is trying to lead viewers to make any sort of conclusion regarding its subject.  Informative and entertaining, Salinger is recommended both for fans of the author and those who appreciative a real life literary tale with a few twists.  It opens tomorrow (9/6) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.