If there was one thing Holden Caulfield hated it was the movies. "Don't even mention them to me," said the iconic narrator of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. And unfortunately Danny Strong's Salinger biopic, Rebel in the Rye, which premiered Wednesday at Sundance Film Festival, would do little to change the character's or author's mind.
The highly anticipated film stars Nicholas Hoult as a handsome, virile young Salinger, Kevin Spacey as his bilious Columbia University teacher, and Sarah Paulson as Salinger's literary agent. And as the cast walked the red carpet and cameras flashed, it was almost impossible not to imagine what the famously private Salinger might make of this premiere, or, more precisely, exactly how much he would hate it.
As the first narrative feature film about one of the world's most famous, yet still fundamentally unknown writers, it arrives with great expectations, some good intentions, and an Oscar-caliber cast, but it frankly feels, to use Holden's favorite word, phony.
It's not that Rebel in the Rye is an unusually phony Hollywood biopic—it is familiarly phony. It follows the ironic, iron-clad, cinematic law which states: The life story of every unconventional, rule-breaking iconoclast will be told at least once in the most conventional and formulaic period biopic.
The film isn't a travesty. It's just not very interesting. Written and directed proficiently by Danny Strong in his directorial debut, the reverential film is graced by a strong cast, sharp period details, and an earnest concern for the actual craft of writing. Based on Kenneth Slawenski's J. D. Salinger: A Life, the film captures the broadest strokes of Salinger's life story. Just as his literary career was taking off in New York and he has discovered the character of Holden, Japan dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor. Soon after, he landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. He fought in a nightmarish series of deadly battles and was present to the liberation of Dachau, always carrying his notebooks—and writing about Holden. The film quotes many recognizable lines from his letters, including one he to his daughter: "You could live a lifetime, and never really get he smell of burning flesh out of your nose."
Given the gaps in Salinger's biography, and the unavoidable fact that Salinger's estate declined to cooperate, the film is heavy on period detail and notable incidents and less persuasive when it comes the idiosyncratic character of the man himself. The film opens with Salinger as an urbane, fast-talking wiseguy—more a character of 1940s films than reality. Salinger's romance with Oona O'Neill (who left him for Charlie Chaplin) is told in quick, superficial vignettes. His friends and family take turns walking on-screen and off, leaving little impact.
Then the film pivots into typewriter montages of clattering keys and ripped up drafts before arguing, as the biography did, that Salinger's post-traumatic stress was the source of his isolation. Strong tells his decades-spanning story in a rush, perhaps hoping his audience won't notice the gaps as he speeds from 1940 into the 1950s. The film hurries so fast, it's as if it's nervous to slow down—and it begins to feel like a collection of the noted distractions Salinger strived so hard to avoid.
This would all be mediocre enough if the ending wasn't so, well, phony. But the final scrawl is a formulaic groaner, stating that Salinger's millions of fans were wondering what he was doing in private all those years. Then it answers for him with three white words on a black screen: "He was writing."
Salinger did continue writing. But did he spend the last half century of his life in monastic, monomaniacal, literary seclusion? (What about that third wife? The grandkids? The groceries? Or his apparently close relationship with his son, who now manages his estate?) The ending, like much of this film, feels more cute than true.
