Review: My Salinger Year Is an Insipid Devil Wears Prada Knock-Off

The film fails to effectively seize on how its main character’s life and work experiences have affected her as a person and artist.

My Salinger Year
Photo: IFC Films

Based on Joanna Rakoff’s memoir of the same name, writer-director Philippe Falardeau’s 1990s-set My Salinger Year trudges a well-worn path as it follows twentysomething Joanna (Margaret Qualley) as she attempts to jumpstart her writing career, opportunities for which she hopes will arise out of her current job as a secretary for a New York literary agency. Her work is the one wrinkle that distinguishes this adaptation from so many other films about aspiring writers trying to make it in the big city, as Joanna’s boss, Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), represents The Catcher in the Rye’s reclusive author J.D. Salinger, thus allowing the young woman to fulfill a common fantasy of coming into close contact with a literary hero. But it also means that the film abounds in hip references to mold-breaking literary works and figures, a familiarity that quickly tumbles into banality.

Throughout, the plotlines tracing Joanna’s work at the agency and her personal life and struggles to become a writer are so half-heartedly braided together that it can feel as if you’re watching scenes from two different films. Though she’s on a first-name basis with one of the literary world’s most legendary enigmas, Joanna views her job as nothing but a career steppingstone—an ambivalence that appears to have rubbed off on Falardeau’s storytelling.

Because My Salinger Year fails to effectively seize on how her life and work experiences have affected her as a person and artist, Joanna is left feeling like a blank slate. Aside from the moment where she says that she’s published two poems, we learn almost nothing about her writing and process. As such, it’s more than a bit perverse that the novel that her self-absorbed boyfriend, Don (Douglas Booth), is working on commands so much of Falardeau’s attention—just one more relationship drama in a film that’s too often pulled in the wrong direction.

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At least there a few spirited moments that enliven My Salinger Year, none more so than the acknowledgement of The Catcher in the Rye’s rabid fandom. At the literary agency, Joanna is tasked with answering Salinger’s fan letters with impersonal pre-written responses that date back decades, and as fans look into the camera while reading their letters, the film poignantly details how the mark of a great work is one that appeals to diverse readers while seeming as if it were written for an audience of one. Which makes it all the more jarring when Joanna, per company policy, shreds the fan letter as soon as she’s done composing her response to it.

But what’s initially eloquent about this angle takes a turn toward the hackneyed, when Joanna begins to imagine a specific fan (Théodore Pellerin) as an imaginary conscience of sorts and Falardeau utilizes the character to literally vocalize the subtext of multiple scenes. The emergence of this plot device in an already insipid narrative inadvertently recalls a sequence earlier in My Salinger Year when Joanna goes rogue and responds to a fan letter in her own words. As Joanna tells a high schooler to take inspiration from Holden Caulfield and think for herself, it’s hard not to feel that the film itself should have taken her advice.

Score: 
 Cast: Margaret Qualley, Sigourney Weaver, Douglas Booth, Brían F. O'Byrne, Théodore Pellerin, Colm Feore, Seána Kerslake, Hamza Haq  Director: Philippe Falardeau  Screenwriter: Philippe Falardeau  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 101 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video, Book

Wes Greene

Wes Greene is a film writer based out of Philadelphia.

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