“Salinger,” the doorstop-thick new biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno, announces itself on the dust jacket as “the official book of the acclaimed documentary film” of the same title.
The film itself credits Paul Alexander’s biography of Salinger as its source.
“Acclaimed” is perhaps wishful thinking, but the most dubious words in that puffy phrase are “documentary film.”
There are plenty of archival images and talking-head interviews, but “Salinger,” directed by Memphis-born Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the by-product of its own publicity campaign.
It does not so much explore the life and times of J. D. Salinger as run his memory and legacy through a spin cycle of hype.
Salinger moved to the woods of Cornish, New Hampshire partly to escape the intrusions and indignities of American celebrity culture.
“Salinger” is that culture’s revenge.
Salerno, a dogged researcher and tireless interviewer, assembles his documentary material (supplemented by re-enactments and propelled by a throbbing, action-movie score) into a breathless story full of hyperbole and speculation.
The resulting blend of reverence and character assassination is an almost perfect distillation of the modern pathology of fame.
Salinger, a talented, hard-working and very popular writer, who died in 2010, is built up into a world-historical literary genius.
Though a few negative reviews are mentioned — by Mary McCarthy and John Updike, most notably — they are drowned out by a chorus of extravagant praise.
High school students and movie stars testify that “The Catcher in the Rye” changed their lives and changed the world.
But Salinger’s work is built up in this way so that his life can be torn open, and the fortress of privacy he erected around it torn down.
A run-of-the-mill eccentric author of short stories might be left alone in the hills above the Connecticut River, but a genius of this caliber, whose books have been declared the common property of all humanity, is clearly asking to be exposed.
And several of his stalkers — journalists and fans who staked out Salinger’s local post office or roosted at the bottom of his drive way — choose to interpret his supposed reclusiveness as a covert demand for attention.
This is an interesting and not altogether implausible idea, one of many that flicker into view during “Salinger,” only to be dissolved in the acid of sensationalism.
Some of the film’s most intriguing information has to do with Salinger’s experiences in World War II, where he endured almost 300 days in combat and took part in the liberation of Dachau.
He stayed in Europe after V-E Day to work with the Army Counterintelligence Corps and was briefly married to a German woman, Syvia, who may have been a Nazi.
All the while, he was writing chapters of “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Salerno overplays his hand by making the war the key to nearly everything about Salinger, the primal wound that festers beneath the surface of his stories about young, rich, disaffected Americans.
The idea that “Catcher” is a closet combat novel is provocative and not necessarily dismissible, but it needs to be argued with a sense of literary nuance, a sense of literature as something other than a message-delivery system, that is utterly missing here.
Juxtaposing cover art from an early paperback edition of “Catcher” with photographs of death camp corpses does not do the trick.
The other main theme of “Salinger” is his personal life, in particular the relationships he had, platonic and not, with younger women and teen age girls.
Interviews with two of them — Jean Miller, who met Salinger in the late 1940s in Florida and who is thought to have inspired his story “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor,” and Daphne Joyce Maynard (educated Yale, no degree), who lived with Salinger in the early ’70s and later wrote a book about the experience — are genuinely illuminating and disturbing.
His behaviour with them sheds a queasy light on his fiction, which often dwells on the precocity and half-innocence of characters perched on the brink of ruinous disillusionment.
“Salinger” offers up the bombshell revelation — anonymously sourced and blasted onto the screen with the kind of music that usually accompanies the destruction of a planet — that more novels are in store.
Those will be acclaimed (or not) in due course, but in the meantime, Salinger fans will have to contend with this garish and confusing portrait.
There are insights that can be plucked from it, but to do so requires strenuous resistance to the spirit of the project (both book and film), which is not just leering and gossipy, but aggressively anti-literary.
It is not entirely Salerno’s fault that he barely quotes any of Salinger’s words, apart from a few snippets of letters in the possession of their recipients.
The film is dealing with an author notoriously protective of his copyright.
One of the few times he initiated contact with a journalist was to expose, and try to suppress, the circulation of pirated editions of early stories.
But it is curious that a movie about such a notorious perfectionist should be so sloppy in matters of judgment and craft.
The re-enactments — in which a dark-haired figure in a suit paces a darkened stage and pounds away at a typewriter, or else (dressed in a blue jumpsuit) lumbers through the forest with an ax — are embarrassingly literal.
And the conversation about the place of “The Catcher in the Rye” in the imaginations of a few notorious killers would be a parody of hyper-ventilating tabloidism if it were not so obviously the real thing.
One of the experts dragged into that discussion notes that the word “phony” appears in “Catcher” more than 30 times.
The last time I read the book, I thought Holden Caulfield overused that word, but, in this case, it is surely le mot juste.
“Salinger” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gruesome wartime images and icky sexual implications.
Salinger
Opens on Friday.
Directed by Shane Salerno; based on the book by Paul Alexander; director of photography, Buddy Squires; edited by Regis B. Kimble, Langdon F. Page and Jeffrey Doe; music by Lorne Balfe; produced by Mr. Salerno, Mr. Squires, Deborah Randall and Craig Fanning; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 2 hours.
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