Exhaustively researched documentary on author J.D. Salinger, the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. Compiled from five years of research and over 150 interview subjects, including Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton and Danny DeVito.
The filmmakers claim this to be the first work to get beyond the author's meticulously built up wall: his childhood, painstaking work methods, marriages, private world and the secrets he left behind after his death in 2010.
There’s a lot to cover in Salinger, seeing as its reclusive subject is one of the most talked-about authors of the 20th Century. Dense, and possibly treating the author with too much reverence, Shane Salerno’s doco is at times also over-wrought, but luckily his subject is so damn intriguing that he carries Salinger through its most heavy-handed moments.
Full reviewIt ends up feeling like a long-winded carnival-barker pitch, even though a goodly number of genuine gems are buried within its noisy confines.
Full reviewYou wonder why Salerno thought the man who created Holden Caulfield would be best served by an abundance of sentimentalism, a stock sap-tastic score and some genuinely cheesy dramatizations on a black stage (the director is no Hollywood phony, but still).
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It is curious that a movie about such a notorious perfectionist should be so sloppy in matters of judgment and craft.
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Salinger fans will see it through a frown of disdain, emitting occasional whimpers of protest, but see it they will for its revelations...
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It is everything the Salinger of his books was not: predictable, cliched, banal, and worst of all, phony.
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The cult of J.D. Salinger will be burnished by this lively but superficial doc.
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At two hours and nine minutes, Salinger is at least 40 minutes too long, suffering, just like the book, from its creators' obsessive zeal. Only here, you can't page ahead to the next chapter.
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