My Salinger Year

Considering J.D. Salinger’s rejection of the film industry after My Foolish Heart (1949), the botched big-screen adaptation of his short story “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” it’s fitting that subsequent movies centered on him have likewise flopped.

But unlike Shane Salerno’s confoundedly bad documentary Salinger, the rote biopic Rebel in the Rye, and the pretentious confrontation movies Coming Through the Rye and Chasing Holden, My Salinger Year succeeds by keeping the reclusive author as an amusing anecdote within a delightful coming-of-age tale, maintaining his enigma status instead of attempting to define it.

Working from Joanna Rakoff’s memoir by the same name, writer/director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) dramatizes the source author’s experiences reading Salinger’s fan mail while working at his literary agency in 1995, imbuing them with a heartbreaking innocence that gradually takes on inspiring self-confidence as the young woman figures out what she truly wants out of life.

As Joanna, Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) starts off a bit too jittery, conveying the New York City transplant’s nervous energy a bit too literally, but soon settles into a far more appealing groove. Key to that improvement is her hiring at the agency, where her colleagues include classic urban curmudgeons with hearts of gold played by Sigourney Weaver, Colm Feore, and Yanic Truesdale (Michel from Gilmore Girls).

The officemates’ exchanges — and the occasional phone call from “Jerry” Salinger himself — provide the films strongest moments, though Joanna’s home life with her comically ill-fitting boyfriend Don (Douglas Booth, Noah) further rounds out her personality and suggests she still has a decent amount of revelations ahead.

Tying it all together are the letters Joanna reads most days at work, written by people with plenty in common with the filmmakers who’ve tried and failed to make respectable features about Salinger. But as with his handling of the Catcher in the Rye author, Falardeau relegates these fans to minor supporting roles, staging their words as desperate pleas and praises from real-life people whom only Joanna will encounter, thereby granting them more validity than a misguided pilgrimage to Salinger’s front door could ever accomplish onscreen.

Grade: B-plus. Rated R. Now playing at the Flat Rock Cinema

(Photo: IFC Films)