Day: September 5, 2013

The Man, the Myth, the Recluse: LFM Reviews Salinger

By Joe Bendel. There will be no movie adaptations of The Catcher in the Rye. The terms of J.D. Salinger’s literary trust are quite clear on that score. However, the eagerly anticipated documentary profile of Holden Caulfield’s creator might be the next closest thing, considering how legions of admirers often intimately intertwine the character with Salinger. Shane Salerno takes a remarkably even-handed look at the reclusive author and the events that shaped his life in the simply titled Salinger, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Essentially, most of what you have heard is true. Salinger did not stop writing in 1965. In conjunction with the documentary’s publicity campaign, news of five new Salinger works to be published beginning in 2015 has already been released. Yes, readers might recognize some of the characters, but there is still more to Salinger the man and the film than that.

There are two main threads to Salerno’s years-in-the-making documentary. One explores Salinger the recluse, arguing the author knowingly fueled the mystique that surrounded his withdrawal from public life. Concurrently, Salerno also documents Salinger’s life, including his formative years spent in the army during WWII. Experiencing D-Day, the liberation of Dachau, and the de-nazification campaign, Salinger saw real horrors that he never shook off.

To his credit, Salerno never seeks to defend or condemn Salinger. He simply explains. Given the context of his military experience and painful early romances, viewers can better understand how Salinger became such a figure of thorny complexity. By the same token, Salerno never excuses Salinger’s more problematic behavior, such as his history of pursuing highly impressionable and considerably younger women (girls, really), only to treat them with cool detachment once they commenced a relationship.

Despite the paucity of Salinger photos and video, Salerno constructs a fully balanced, multi-dimensional portrait of the author. He incorporates scores of talking head interviews, but most participants are heard from only briefly. However, Salinger’s former companions (or what have you) Joyce Meynard and Jean Miller have sufficient time to tell their very personal stories. Yet, perhaps the best sequences involve Salinger’s army buddies, with whom he remained on good terms throughout his life.

There are some over stylized flourishes to Salinger, but the early caper-like sequences capturing the attempts of both fans and journalists to track down the elusive writer effectively establish a mysterious mood, thereby setting the stage for the revelations to follow. Always highly watchable, Salerno’s Salinger never feels like it is trying to lead viewers to make any sort of conclusion regarding its subject. Informative and entertaining, Salinger is recommended both for fans of the author and those who appreciative a real life literary tale with a few twists. It opens tomorrow (9/6) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on September 5th, 2013 at 9:15pm.

LFM Reviews Adore (or Whatever It’s Titled Today)

From "Adore."

By Joe Bendel. English language Nobel laureates for literature have complicated relationship with cinema. Arguably, Steinbeck has fared the best, providing the source material for masterworks from John Ford and Elia Kazan. Ernest Hemingway films have been a radically mixed bag, including some gems and some clunkers. Faulkner films have generally been an iffy proposition. However, director Anne Fontaine and screenwriter Christopher Hampton will drastically lower the curve with their smarmy adaptation of Doris Lessing’s Two Grandmothers, now known as Adore for its New York opening this Friday.

Lessing’s original title, The Grandmothers, obviously does not sound very sexy. Hence, Fontaine’s film was known as Two Mothers at Sundance, where my colleagues in the press corps took the bullet to inform the world this was no art movie. Six months or so later, it was re-titled Adore, right up there at the top of the alphabet, presumably to be VOD friendly. No matter what it’s called, this film is sure to disappoint.

Lil’s husband never was much, so when he dies, she is able to carry-on raising her son Ian well enough on her own, with the help of her BFF Roz. Roz also has a son, Tom, and a perfectly serviceable husband, Harold, who just does not seem to be the sort of doofus she wants anymore. For most of the summer, the lads surf, while their mother booze it up on the shore, drinking up their lean frames. Eventually, Ian puts the moves on Roz and Tom follows suit with Lil.

Oh gee, how scandalous. At least, that is how the filmmakers would like us to react. Frankly, it is not worth getting worked up over. Never before has cougar-boy toy sex been so boring. In lieu of substance, we get an interminable surfeit of morning after shots, following the characters walking on the beach, staring off into the horizon. Yet, by far the gravest sin of Adore (Fontaine’s dubious English language debut) is Hampton’s ridiculous dialogue. There is no way real people would ever talk like this. However, it probably looked great on the page, eliciting all sorts of “edgy” compliments from Hampton’s screenwriter colleagues.

From "Adore."

Indeed, there is a cynical laziness to Adore that assumes it merely needs to deliver the promised quota of taboo sex for critics and viewers to be intimidated by “provocative” nature. The truth is there is no there there. The characters are paper thin and not once do their reactions ring true. Anyone who can tell Xavier Samuel’s Ian apart from James Frecheville’s Tom should win a cigar from exhibiting theaters. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright have a few nice moments together, but evidently Fontaine and Hampton believe the world already had enough films about friendships between middle aged women.

Yes, Adore addresses sexual relations, but never with any kind of intelligence or maturity. In truth, it lacks the depth and insight of an average Pia Zadora movie. Slow, smug, and shallow, Adore is an absolute waste of the talents of Fontaine (whose The Girl from Monaco is far sexier and emotionally complicated), Watts, Wright, and the normally reliable Ben Mendelsohn. Not recommended, especially for those who think it might hold guilty pleasures, Adore opens this Friday (9/6) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

LFM GRADE: F

Posted on September 5th, 2013 at 9:11am.