National Post (National Edition)
Reading between the lines
My Salinger Year
Cast: Margaret Qualley, Sigourney Weaver Director: Philippe Falardeau Duration: 1 h 41 m Available: In select cinemas (Saskatoon, Regina, Ottawa and Montreal), with others to follow. On demand through iTunes and on VIFF Connect (in B.C.)
It's a rare movie where the watching feels like curling up with a good book. I recall feeling like that with The Remains of the Day, James Ivory's 1993 film based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Lightning struck again in 2010 with Never Let Me Go.
And here it is with My Salinger Year, based on Joanna Rakoff's 2014 memoir about the time she worked for Harold Ober Associates, a literary agency whose clients included J.D. Salinger.
It's set in 1996. It's arguably a little past the end of the analogue age, but that era still holds at Harold Ober, where a Dictaphone and an electric typewriter represent the cutting edge of technology allowed by Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), Salinger's curt, flinty agent. Midway through the movie she allows a computer into the office, provided it comes with “a little coat thing.” Remember the days when personal computers had dust jackets for those many hours every day when you turned them off and stopped using them?
Young Rakoff (Margaret Qualley) wants to be a writer. She's had poems published in The Paris Review. Moving to New York and getting what is basically a secretary's job at a literary agency is the closest she can get to that life and still pay the bills. Even to do that much requires her to crash at a friend's place and, when her welcome becomes strained, moving in with a boyfriend whom we sense from the start isn't The One.
The film was directed by Quebec's Philippe Falardeau, who excels at creating generous spaces for characters who might be at best liminal in real life: a young Haitian political aide in My Internship in Canada; an eccentric inventor seeking his birth story in Congorama; a minor figure in the boxing world who nonetheless inspired the movie Rocky, in Chuck. And of course an inspirational teacher in the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar.
Rakoff 's life isn't the stuff of Big Motion Pictures, but this clubby peek into a recent but already bygone New York literary era is more than worth your engagement.
And with her direct stare and no-nonsense narration, often matched in tone by the cinematography of Sara Mishara (Tu dors Nicole) — the film pulls you into its world. There's no exact equivalent of page-turner or can't-putit-down in the cinema. Some films put you on the edge of your seat. This one will make you want to settle back in it instead.