A magnificent artist, a wounded soul, a searcher who spent the better part of his life in ass𒁏iduous pursuit of grace, J.D. Salinger today is reduced to an episode of TMZ. “Salinger” is a greasy, ignoble and infuriating documentary that despoils its subje♏ct: Were he alive, he’d buy up all the copies of this film and burn them.
The author of “The Catcher in the Rye” and three other slim volumes tha𝕴t rerouted and recharged many a young mind — including mine: “Franny and Zooey” is my favorite novel — didn’t live a life that required sensationalizing.
Jerry Salinger dated Eugene O’Neill’s beautiful daughter and lost her to Charlie Chaplin, stormed Utah Beach on D-Day, participated in the liberations of Paris and Dachau, was among the minority in his unit to survive the agonizing Battle of Hurtgen Forest, illegally (after the war) married a German girl, whose passport he forged to make her appear French, conjured up several disturbing and doomed romances with sweet nymphets, and (incidentally) wrote the most influential novel of the century. Then he stopped p📖ublishing, in 1965, though he lived until 2010.
Despite bom💃bastic music, febrile editing and meaningless filler, director Shane Salerno (best known for the screenplay for “Armageddon”) has what may be, if confirmed, the literary-journalism scoop of the century: details about five books that Salinger’s estate plans to begin publishing in 2015.
Salerno also scores a revealing interview with Jean Miller, the apparent inspiration for the story “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor.” Salinger met the precocious girl on a Florida beach when she was 14 and vowed to her m𒉰other that he would marry her. Five years later, on Jean’s initiative, they finally had sex, and he dumped her the next day. She wa🏅s one of a succession of too-young women — his Phoebes and Frannys — whose innocence he would extract like a vampire.
Salerno also comes up with some new photos and about 10 seconds of silent film of Salinger chatting with locals in liberated Europe, but most of the movie is a rehash of facts already known. (The movie is based on Paul Alexander’s biog𓄧raphy, though it comes with a scrapbook-like companion volume of its own by Salerno and liter🐓ary writer David Shields.) Random celebrities — a soiled pile of mumbling laundry turns out, on closer inspection, to be Philip Seymour Hoffman — share superfluous insights, and various photographers and fans talk about stalking Salinger after he retreated to the New Hampshire woods shortly after “The Catcher in the Rye” brought him fame in 1951.
That notoriety — not the fragile, elliptical stories Sale✅rno seems barely to have read — drives the documentary. Hey, it’s that famous dude who inspired the movie “Finding Forrester”! A montage of children of the world reading “Catcher,” staged like a chewing-gum commercial, is nauseating, though not so emetic as the many scenes of a moody actor “dramatically” re-enacting Salinger at the typewriter while war images are projected behind him. Playwright John Guare gets close to blaming Salinger for the psychopathology of the murder-minded loons (including Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley) who revered “Catcher,” and the movie baldly states that Salinger’s fir✨st wife was a Nazi, which is unconfirmed.
“Salinger” is equally🍎 fatuous when it claims to present the only picture of Salinger writing “Catcher” while in Europe during the war. He may have been working on that or any of the many stories and letters he produced. We don’t know.
So successful was Sal🐽ཧinger at locking down his life that the film’s few new details make it essential viewing for fans. Still, it’s so crass that it’s like walking into a philosophy lecture — only to learn it’s being delivered by Donald Trump.