Film Review: My Salinger Year
Margaret Qualley in My Salinger Year.
My Salinger Year, directed by Phillippe Falardeau, is a warm and engaging film about a young writer’s attempt to forge her own voice.
The story centres on Joanna Rakoff, played by Margaret Qualley, who lands a new job at a literary agency to satiate her passion for writing. The agency, however, represents the reclusive J. D. Salinger, which leaves Joanna the mundane job of sifting through endless fan letters and typing out generic responses. However, Joanna’s brimming passion leads her to overstep her boundaries and provide personal responses as a way of facilitating her own desire to write.
Based on real-life memoir, Falardeau’s script and direction embellishes narrative elements to establish a tangible coming-of-age story. Falardeau draws on the real-world obscurity of Salinger to convey him as an omniscient presence that informs Joanna’s naïveté about the industry. However, this cinematic construct is backgrounded to highlight the growth and maturity of Joanna as a person, rather than her writing ambition. Qualley invests a nervous energy that encapsulates her outsider position with the well-established environments and people of New York. This evolves into a greater confidence in her disposition, indicated through an eventual increasing sharpness in language aimed at her boyfriend that is absent early on in the film.
The film frequently reminds the viewer of Joanna’s desire to be published, but seldom are their tangible efforts on her part, or the film’s, to do so. Salinger himself on the phone advises her to “write 15 minutes a day” and to always “protect that sanctuary”, but the audience never sees Joanna taking this advice. Instead, her character arc is buffed with intriguing relationship tensions and fractures that allow her to find her own voice and individualism within a bustling New York.
Margaret Qualley in My Salinger Year.
This sense of freedom and independence is hinted at throughout the film, but is never ultimately central to the plot. Joanna makes an arguably tough decision to leave her ex-boyfriend behind in California to pursue a writing career in New York. Although, the light-hearted nature of the film seldom delves into the difficulty of this choice, as if it was made on a whim.
Joanna’s new socialist boyfriend, Don (Douglas Booth), is more in keeping with her idealisation of the scrappy writer’s lifestyle. The film’s dramatic aspects are compellingly portrayed here as Joanna realises that being an artist, or a novelist, is not realistic without understanding the fiscal side of the career choice. An ideological dichotomy emerges with her boyfriend through a recurring visual motif that shows the couple separated by a wall, working individually within their apartment. This growing apart manifests in heated arguments as Joanna becomes more proficient at her job, while distancing herself from her boyfriend’s rugged lifestyle. Yet, as the film goes down a clear trajectory for Joanna’s arc, it appears to muddle the ideas with an ending that implies her passion as a writer is still paramount.
In contrast to this, Sigourney Weaver plays Joanna’s boss Margaret; a hardened pragmatist constantly weary of the industry’s harsh realities. Her cutting cynicism is notably symbolised with a yellow jumper wrapped around her shoulder, almost resembling armour that shield her emotions from interfering with her business instincts. She represents the polar opposite of Joanna’s romanticism, yet, through personal tragedy, her characterisation is softened to become a maternal guidance for Joanna.
Replete with rich, vibrant colours and details of the time period, Falardeau’s light-hearted tale offers an at times interesting, but equally unfulfilling glimpse into the literary world.
3/5
My Salinger Year is showing in Australian cinemas from the 14th January 2021.