Salinger (2013)

A photographer sits in a car, which is parked across the street from a small post office in Windsor, Vermont. He begins talking to no one in particular about a job he was assigned several years ago. He was told to track down and take a picture of J.D. Salinger in his natural habitat, despite the fact that the author long ago ran away from the spotlight. After two days of waiting around and getting nothing, he is able to finally capture an unknowing Salinger as he leaves the post office with his mail. It’s an interesting enough anecdote, but in Shane Salerno’s frustrating documentary Salinger it is treated with all the weight of an impending nuclear explosion. The music is like something out of The Dark Knight Rises, the cuts come fast and furious, and when the photo finally reveals itself its as if the audience is supposed to collectively gasp and fan their faces at what the movie has just shown them. This is a movie much more obsessed with the mystery of J.D. Salinger rather than the man J.D. Salinger, and Salerno treats every so-called revelation in his film as if he is doing work just as important as The Catcher in the Rye itself. Salinger gives the caffeinated celebrity treatment to a man who had very little interest in celebrity, and the result is a tone-deaf piece of work that would have been drastically improved if it just took a couple seconds to breathe once in a while. Not that it would have solved Salerno’s wrongheaded approach to just about everything.

Nonetheless, if you want to just hear a bunch of people talk about how awesome J.D. Salinger was for two hours while Salerno piles on a few thousand distracting bells and whistles that don’t amount to anything, then Salinger is just the film experience for you. It is at its best when it goes into full-on biography mode, but even then it has precious little to offer in the way of real sources. The vast majority of Salerno’s interview subjects simply sit there and spew “what if” and “might have” statements that you could likely hear from anyone who once googled the author’s name. Documentaries aren’t supposed to be about speculation. With a few genuinely interesting exceptions, that’s all Salerno has to offer here. That’s even the case with the big reveal at the end of the film, in which Salerno claims that various Salinger works will be posthumously published beginning in 2015. Perhaps that will happen, and that would be great if it does, but Salerno presents this information as though he is Moses returning from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.

There’s no inherent problem with giving Salinger the respect he deserves, but the way in which Salerno does this is odd at best and headache-inducing at worst. Salinger is a wall-to-wall barrage of obnoxious sound effects, quick editing that would drive Michael Bay crazy, and truly puzzling reenactments of various moments in his subject’s life. And dear lord, that musical score. As if the film wasn’t already pounding every idea home with all the subtlety of a bazooka, Lorne Balfe’s soundtrack fills every frame with dramatic strings and percussion that seem more at home in a James Bond movie than a documentary about a reclusive writer. There are some interesting passages in this movie, but as in life, if someone does little but scream at you for two hours, you’re probably going to stop listening after a while.

Grade: C-