Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Philippe Falardeau
Starring: Margaret Qualley, Sigourney Weaver, Douglas Booth, Seána Kerslake, Colm
Feore and Brían F. O'Byrne
My New York Year is the latest addition to the growing
canon of films in which normies find themselves in some sort of
relationship with a celebrity. We've seen members of the great unwashed
hanging out with Marilyn Monroe (My Summer with Marilyn), James Dean (Life), Dylan Thomas (Set Fire to the Stars), Miles Davis (Miles Ahead) and Gloria Grahame (Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool) to name but a few recent examples. Now it's the turn of reclusive
American author JD Salinger, though the key difference here is that the
writer's relationship with our heroine occurs solely over the
phone.
Adapted from Joanna Rakoff's memoir 'My Salinger Year',
writer/director Philippe Falardeau's film stars
Margaret Qualley in the role of a young Joanna, who moves to New
York with a broad goal of becoming a writer. She figures the best way to
do this is to get a job, any job, in the literary world, and so she
takes a lowly position with a literary agency run by stern luddite
Margaret (Sigourney Weaver). Margaret's biggest client is none
other than the 'Catcher in the Rye' author, despite him not having
written anything in decades.
A large part of Joanna's job requires her to tackle the fan letters the
agency receives addressed to Salinger and reply with a stock letter
explaining how the author doesn't wish to receive any correspondence.
Reading the letters, Joanna begins to become personally attached to the
people touched by Salinger's work and even goes so far as to begin
replying with her own letters. When Salinger proposes republishing a
1965 story for The New Yorker, Joanna does her best to ensure the writer
isn’t off-put by the cold approach of Margaret.
My New York Year never quite decides on what story it's
trying to tell, bringing up various subplots that never really amount to
anything, along with supporting characters that don’t seem to serve any
narrative purpose. I couldn't figure out what we're supposed to make of
Joanna visiting an old boyfriend who reappears later in a fantasy ballet
sequence. Margaret is established initially as a sort of literary world
cousin of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, but her character is largely side-lined. We twig early on that
Margaret's closed-off manner is concealing some sort of personal pain,
but we're only offered nuggets of who the real Margaret is.
The movie has the breezy feel of a '90s TV show aimed at teenage girls,
which would be fine if this were merely the pilot for an upcoming
series, but it's all a bit insubstantial for a standalone movie. There's
no real conflict or drama here, with Joanna landing on her feet at every
turn. The closest she has to a problem is getting rid of her boyfriend
(Douglas Booth), a terrible wannabe novelist whom the audience
pegs as a wrong 'un from his introduction but whom Joanna seems to
immediately fall for.
All that said, thanks to Qualley's infectious performance as a book
nerd living the dream, we're swept along on her improbably easy journey
through New York's literary scene. It's a charming piece of superficial
story-telling but the complete lack of obstacles to Joanna's progress
borders on science fiction. Everyone bends over backwards to accommodate
her, and more cynical viewers may find themselves asking if this would
be the case if she didn't look like Margaret Qualley? If you can put
aside such an inconvenient question for its running time,
My New York Year is a minor delight.
