Salinger

The Weinstein Co.
Rated PG-13 for disturbing war images, thematic elements and smoking.
Running time: 120 minutes.
Two stars out of four.

J.D. Salinger, the man, would have hated “Salinger,” the film — not just because the famously reclusive writer would have recoiled at the effort to expose his private life, but also because it’s the kind of glossy, celebrity-driven hype that he made his name railing against.

Director Shane Salerno, who also is releasing a lengthy book and a television special alongside his documentary, spent nine years working on this project, and his obsession has resulted in a film that’s as exhaustively researched as you might imagine. Despite all that effort, though, his film is never quite satisfying. It feels overstuffed and overlong, getting bogged down as it does in the minutiae of certain segments of Salinger’s life without conveying a big-picture sense of what his actual writing was like — why it mattered, and why it still matters.

Celebrities including Edward Norton, John Cusack and Philip Seymour Hoffman provide quick glimpses of their memories of reading “The Catcher in the Rye,” the groundbreaking 1951 debut novel that was such a smash success, it sent Salinger scurrying into hiding in the New Hampshire woods. Perhaps they, too, experienced the high school rite of passage of reading it in 10th-grade English class. (Stars: They’re just like us!) Martin Sheen gets a bit more screen time to provide some historical perspective, but still: Why these people of all the celebrities in all the world? If they have any particular affinity for Salinger, it’s unclear.

The inclusion of famous talking heads ends up feeling like one more gimmick in a movie filled with them. The worst of these is Salerno’s decision to stage theatrical, often painfully on-the-nose reenactments. (I have no problem philosophically with this approach, which can be dramatically effective in a documentary like James Marsh’s “Man on Wire.”)

Granted, Salerno had to fill in the gaps and flesh out the mystery of Salinger with something, but these images tend to be clunky, hokey and repetitive. An actor playing Salinger pounds away at a typewriter on a dark stage, an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips, rejected pages scattered artfully across the floor. A little girl playing his daughter, Margaret, runs through the woods and bangs on the door of the sealed-off cabin where he’d write for days straight without acknowledging the outside world. Salinger visits various editors and publishers (all of whom work in the same historic office building, apparently) with mixed results.

The section in which Salerno reflects on the global impact of “The Catcher in the Rye” over the past six decades feels slick and cheesy by comparison. I don’t need random people standing in the middle of Times Square telling me why the book was significant, how Holden Caulfield spoke to them directly unlike any other character, much less multitudes in tiny boxes saying so again and again in various languages. It feels like filler, something that shouldn’t exist given the time and effort Salerno dedicated to this subject.

But “Salinger” can also be educational, even for fans of the writer’s work who thought they knew a great deal about him. Salerno sheds light on Salinger’s time as a soldier during World War II — hundreds of days in combat, the horrors of which informed everything he wrote afterward, the director theorizes. Salinger’s romance with Oona O’Neill — who left him to marry Charlie Chaplin — is a juicy tidbit, as is his brief marriage to a German woman he met during the war who may or may not have been a Nazi.

Salerno also includes lengthy interviews with some of the women Salinger befriended and/or became emotionally entangled with starting from when they were just young girls. Jean Miller was 14 and Salinger was 30 when they met on the sand in Daytona Beach, Florida, and enjoyed long walks in the sunshine. She recounts with great dignity that they didn’t become intimate until she was 19, but it’s clear that she was part of a pattern. (Miller also was the inspiration for the short story “For Esme — With Love and Squalor.”)

Creepy? More than a little. But in Salinger’s romanticized mind, it seems he was drawn to the sense of innocence and promise they represented. To his credit, Salerno doesn’t judge the author for the many flaws and eccentricities he exposes, and he has a point in suggesting that fans are nuts to demand that Salinger should have taken the time to serve as their personal savior.

After two hours, the meandering biography reveals itself as build-up to the bombshell that there are, indeed, more Salinger works coming: pieces he’d preserved and placed on a schedule for posthumous release starting in 2015. (Salinger died in 2010 at 91.)  So that’s what he was doing all this time. Mystery solved — or perhaps it’s just beginning all over again.