Let me preface this by saying that I'm a pretty huge fan of Salinger's work, and that I didn't go into this doc expecting very much. After all, what can you say about a man who famously kept his personal life as far away from the public eye as possible? As I found out, Shane Salerno's answer to that is "speculation, speculation, speculation."
Not only was the technical quality of this film fairly sophomoric-- a heavy-handed score, the same "reenactments" repeated over and over, visual effects and transitions that looked like they came straight out of iMovie-- but a good portion of it was made up of (entirely white male) talking heads from Hollywood who had nothing to do with Salinger, relating tales of how The Catcher in the Rye changed their lives. That has no place in a documentary that is actually concerned with learning and teaching about a person, but it fits perfectly here, where it's clear that the filmmakers were most interested in duping Salinger fans with irrelevant anecdotes and padding out their scant "evidence" for Salinger's reclusiveness into a two-hour movie.
And it's exactly his reclusiveness that the movie purports to be about, yet they seem to miss the most obvious conclusion: Salinger was a man like any other. There was no deeper meaning to the fact that he didn't want the media or rabid fans in his life, other than his rather private personality. Looking for one, claiming to have found it, and reeling an audience in for two hours of baseless accusations and factual errors, is frankly selfish and irritating. A person's life isn't ours to dissect and claim for ourselves, whether or not that person made something meaningful to us. Where these filmmakers could have created something touching and human, they created a morbid spectacle around a man who liked nothing less, and to me, that's pathetic and sad.
Not only was the technical quality of this film fairly sophomoric-- a heavy-handed score, the same "reenactments" repeated over and over, visual effects and transitions that looked like they came straight out of iMovie-- but a good portion of it was made up of (entirely white male) talking heads from Hollywood who had nothing to do with Salinger, relating tales of how The Catcher in the Rye changed their lives. That has no place in a documentary that is actually concerned with learning and teaching about a person, but it fits perfectly here, where it's clear that the filmmakers were most interested in duping Salinger fans with irrelevant anecdotes and padding out their scant "evidence" for Salinger's reclusiveness into a two-hour movie.
And it's exactly his reclusiveness that the movie purports to be about, yet they seem to miss the most obvious conclusion: Salinger was a man like any other. There was no deeper meaning to the fact that he didn't want the media or rabid fans in his life, other than his rather private personality. Looking for one, claiming to have found it, and reeling an audience in for two hours of baseless accusations and factual errors, is frankly selfish and irritating. A person's life isn't ours to dissect and claim for ourselves, whether or not that person made something meaningful to us. Where these filmmakers could have created something touching and human, they created a morbid spectacle around a man who liked nothing less, and to me, that's pathetic and sad.