Caulfield's Implicature

Speranza

It is ironic that films about trail-blazing artists are so often filled with cliches.

Reclusive author J.D. Salinger famously forbade anyone from adapting his novel “The Catcher in the Rye” for the big screen.

Shane Salerno’s ridiculous documentary “Salinger” — based on Salerno’s even worse biography — proves that Salinger was right to keep filmmakers away from him, and from a novel whose iconoclastic take on rebellion would become, paradoxically, iconic to the point of cliche.

Based on Kenneth Slawenski’s biography “J.D. Salinger: A Life,” the biopic “Rebel in the Rye” is a marginal improvement on Salerno’s documentary.

But like that misguided film, writer-director Danny Strong’s feature debut embodies the very phoniness that the author — and his signature character Holden Caulfield — railed against.

Eyes will roll as, early in the film, Salinger is shown writing to editor Whit Burnett the words

“Holden Caulfield is dead.”

Is is an all-too-familiar way of opening a film.

With disillusionment.

What follows backtracks to 1939, when an as yet unpublished Salinger — who was then under the tutelage of Burnett at Columbia — unsuccessfully attempts to court New York socialite Oona O’Neill, the daugher of you-know-who.

As Salinger’s teacher and, later, editor, Spacey is given some pretty cornball dialogue.

Sitting in a New York cafe, he says, “I couldn’t think of a better place to read the work of the next Fitzgerald or Hemingway than right here in Greenwich Village.”

Burnett tries to impart lessons that are valuable for any aspiring writer.

Don’t let the authorial voice, for instance, overwhelm the story.

And Hoult and Spacey do their best to rise above Strong’s expository dialogue and ham-handed melodrama.

The film briefly comes to life whenever Oona O'Neill is on the screen.

But “Rebel in the Rye” quickly arrives at an impasse.

One that’s almost inevitable in films that attempt to render the mysteries of the creative process.

"It just flowed out of me,” Salinger tells Burnett, who has been encouraging the author to dig deeper into his Holden character.

What flows out of Strong’s script, unfortunately, is boiler-plate literary nonsense.

"I shaped them. I challenged them,” Burnett crows, about such literary giants as William Saroyan and John Cheever. “I discovered them all.”

The most cringe-inducing moments in the film come — more than once — when, after “The Catcher in the Rye" has been published (after having been written, of all places, in a farm on charming Old Road, off Boston Post Road, in Westport, Connecticut), fans of "The Catcher in the Rye" awkwardly approach Salinger, dressed in what can only be called Holden Caulfield cosplay.

The publishers who initially rejected Salinger’s novel are, for the most part, portrayed as people who just don’t get it.

Yet one wonders whether Strong himself gets it.

Most people who have read “The Catcher in the Rye” would not envision its author approving of a film that includes a book-release montage — scored against a lightly swinging jazz-vocal version of the Burn's song “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” — that shows Salinger examining his own reflection in a store window.

It is hard to imagine a film more inaptly named -- but I agree that "Salinger's War" would not sell!

As a film, this “Rebel” is, as it turns out, terribly by the book.