Salinger

No one is quite sure how J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, became such a mythical, mysterious figure in contemporary American literature. Writer-director Shane Salerno interviewed 150 people, including members of Salinger's family and friends, but few shed much light on that subject. Apparently, after lovelorn young Jerry Salinger lost Eugene O'Neill's beautiful daughter Oona to Charlie Chaplin, he became obsessed with young, innocent girls. In the 1940s, Salinger met Jean Miller—who inspired the short story For Esmé–With Love and Squalor—on a Florida beach when she was just 14 years old. Five years later, when their sexual union was finally consummated, Salinger lost interest in her. He later courted 18-year-old Yale student Joyce Maynard; the pair lived together in the 1970s (and she later wrote about their relationship). Salinger suffers from repetitive archival footage of the author's WWII Army career, as well as endless noodling over his obsession with being published in The New Yorker and determination to never have his stories made into movies. This self-indulgent, overly-long documentary is meant to complement Salerno and David Shields' nonfiction oral history biography (which was published to mixed reviews). Celebrity after celebrity—Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow, A.E. Hotchner, John Guare, and others—comment on the profound influence of Salinger's teenage antihero Holden Caulfield. Salinger, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, left directions for having his unpublished manuscripts issued posthumously between 2015 and 2020. A shallow, superficial examination of a multi-layered, enigmatic author who clearly meant for his work to speak for itself, this is optional. (S. Granger)