My New York Year | Little White Lies

My New York Year

20 May 2021 / Released: 21 May 2021

A young woman in a green coat standing in a hallway, reading a book intently.
A young woman in a green coat standing in a hallway, reading a book intently.
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Anticipation.

Qualley’s very up-and-coming, Weaver’s an icon, so the potential is there.

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Enjoyment.

Perfectly pleasant, though refuses to do anything that might quicken the pulse.

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In Retrospect.

Lacking in style and substance, would benefit from a major redraft.

An aspir­ing writer forms an unlike­ly con­nec­tion with JD Salinger in this 90s set lit­er­ary drama.

The Amer­i­can author JD Sallinger opt­ed to divorce him­self from pub­lic life after an ini­tial flur­ry of activ­i­ty which pro­duced such canon­i­cal clas­sics of hair-trig­ger teen anx­i­ety as Catch­er in the Rye’ and Fran­ny and Zooey’.

Philippe Falardeau’s film My New York Year is an adap­ta­tion of Joan­na Smith Rakoff’s 2014 mem­oir My Salinger Year’ in which the for­tu­itous col­lege grad, played here by Mar­garet Qual­ley, floats into an entry lev­el posi­tion at a New York lit­er­ary agency that counts the cre­ative­ly dor­mant Sallinger as one its key clients.

Joan­na dreams of becom­ing a writer, and she hopes that her broad knowl­edge of clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture will allow her to make that leap soon­er rather than lat­er. Yet her cold, jad­ed man­ag­er, Mar­garet (Sigour­ney Weaver), swift­ly crush­es that fan­ta­sy and gives her the job that no one else wants: read­ing and then shred­ding all of Salinger’s fan mail, and then respond­ing with a gener­ic kiss-off let­ter which offers dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of, I real­ly don’t care, please go away’.

The wide-eyed ingénue who is tak­en under the wing of the aloof techno­phobe seems like fer­tile ground for chalk/​cheese dra­mat­ic antag­o­nism, and the main high­light of the film is the bare­ly-masked ran­cour trad­ed between Qual­ley and Weaver through care­ful­ly word­ed put-downs and jagged glances.

Else­where, Joan­na takes reg­u­lar calls from the big man him­self who comes across as a hon­ey-voiced lug, advis­ing his young charge to keep on writ­ing if she wants to make it as an author. And… there isn’t real­ly much more to it than that, as the film pulls in var­i­ous digres­sions and vignettes that don’t add up to much at all.

Woman in black jumper reading newspaper in office.

Dou­glas Booth plays Joanna’s boyfriend, Don, tricked out like an Imagine’-era John Lennon and writ­ing porno­graph­ic rape fan­tasies that he pass­es off as an hon­est reflec­tion of his inner soul. There are also var­i­ous side play­ers who crop up for a sin­gle scene to pro­vide Joan­na with a bit of extra back sto­ry, or make her recon­sid­er her life choices.

Falardeau’s flat, unex­cit­ing direc­tion drifts into awk­ward­ness when he jim­mies in a stilt­ed and unnec­es­sary musi­cal num­ber, while the script sits on just the wrong side of inter­est­ing, despite Qualley’s puck­ish com­mit­ment. There’s the occa­sion­al hint that the film might acci­den­tal­ly stum­ble into rel­e­vance, such as when Joan­na decides to write fic­tion­al respons­es to a clutch of Salinger fans, hint­ing at a wider com­men­tary on the Oz-like nature of celebri­ty and fan­dom. Yet the idea is quick­ly dis­card­ed as her job dic­tates she move on to some­thing new.

It’s one of those films that’s entire­ly pleas­ant to sit through, but its strange com­mit­ment to not being about any one thing ends up mak­ing it a for­get­table tri­fle. Cleav­ing to the episod­ic struc­ture of mem­oir leaves it want­i­ng for some the­mat­ic heft, and Salinger him­self ends up being what Hitch­cock refers to as a MacGuf­fin – a mis­cel­la­neous plot device designed to breach the gap between point A and point B.

Its cli­max, too, leaves a bit­ter taste, opt­ing to cel­e­brate Joanna’s enti­tle­ment over her col­lect­ed learn­ings from this event­ful year.

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