Home for the Holidays: Katy Perry Edition

As school vacation days roll into weeks, you’re probably looking for novel ways to keep yourself and the children entertained. Like watching Katy Perry: Part of Me on Netflix Instant. So I checked it out to see what parts she’s talking about exactly. Are they rated PG? The answer is a resounding Disney YES.

Instead of shooting whipped cream from her bra, for the purposes of The California Dreams Tour she goes with the more traditional candy cane uzi. Her dresses are pretty skimpy, sure,  but they take the form of lollipops and mermaids. If your children have been cleared for Barbie, and let’s face it, they have, they can proceed safely with Katy Perry: A Part of Me.

But what about me, the purported adult, you ask.  Will I be bored out of my mind? That all depends, surprisingly, on your position regarding French semiotics, particularly the concept of the simulacrum. Jean Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum can best be understood in terms of the main street of Disneyland. What era or geography are these buildings meant to represent? Some sort of idealized mishmash; it doesn’t really matter. Disneyland has its own reality, which may in fact be preferable, or at least more hygienic than the real thing. You can visit the past; go to space, travel to New Orleans and visit the sacred cinematic space that is the Pirates of the Caribbean all on the family-oriented day. Are you seeing how this applies to Katy Perry’s songwriting? Please, try to keep up with your tour guide.

This is no mere concert film, this is a journey, produced by Academy Award ® winning producer Brian Grazer.  Like it or not,  as in The Pirates of the Caribbean films, there’s going to have to be a plot. Or the quest for a plot, punctuated by songs instead of swordfights. Let me walk you through some of the bright colored narrative ideas that float by in this giddy 93 minutes.

First story balloon: Katy Perry’s career represents a major break from her extremely religious, even puritanical family, who have disowned her for singing about kissing a girl. This narrative is the clear front-runner, since it’s been well-covered by the media. She was in fact from a family of traveling evangelical show people. Even fairy tales and Alice in Wonderland were considered too Satanic for the childrens’ consumption. Unfortunately, this fantastic storyline is blown to bits when we catch up with her mother and father chatting in Las Vegas. He has dyed brown hair and very dark sunglasses (indoors); he looks like a creep(ier?) Roy Orbison.  As traveling evangelicals they are fanatical, sure, but as show-biz insiders they can’t argue with success. We see them basking backstage at the show, in spite of the subversive mermaid action. (This in pointed contrast to Madonna’s dad in Madonna: Truth or Dare,  who seems to have had an entirely more virginal Madonna in mind.)

Second at bat storyline: Russell Brand and Katy Perry as true and potentially star-crossed lovers. This seemed like a very real possibility, based on what I’d read about the rockumentary when it came out. All that is tossed to the wind, however, once we spot the actual Brand backstage, and it becomes clear these “married” people are barely acquainted. But though they really don’t give us much to work with in the flesh, as the long-distance relationship starts to crumble and Brand files for divorce, this narrative arc starts to show potential. The perky Perry gets, like, exhausted and sad for a few nights and has to be coaxed onstage. There’s some crying. Given Brand’s subsequent interest in reforming politics and income inequality, it seems likely this was an early effort to undermine the evil plutocracy from within, one pop star at a time. Valiant, but abortive, as it turns out. Perry overcomes her malaise and returns in full Roar.

If you are going to get technical, that recent hit is not included in this 2012 show. Nor is it written or even "co-written" by Katy Perry. Nonetheless, its weird Toto/Muhammad Ali hybrid gets at something quintessentially KP, and gets us to our final storyline: Katy Perry’s artistic journey. We hear how the lonely young Perry, given a blue guitar (shades of Picasso?), worked at it tirelessly, rockin’ paens to Christ, mainly, to start with. Although her first single “Ur So Gay,” quickly sank, she did manage to hook up with master pop producers The Matrix (Avril Lavigne, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears) and Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette) early on. This is where this particular narrative gets confusing. We hear about Perry rebelling against efforts to make her into another Lavigne or Morissette and to find her own voice. But the songs themselves are very much a presence in the film, and they tell another story. They kept seeming extremely familiar, partly they were big hits (she holds the record for the most hits off one album with Michael Jackson), partly because all her songs sound alike, and partly because they are also wildly reminiscent of all the other pop divas currently on the scene. I kept having the thought, “Oh, I thought that was Kelly Clarkson, or Pink, or Britney Spears.”
There’s a reason for that, as it turns out. Her story is not so much finding her own voice, as finally hooking up with the right songwriting producer,  Max Martin, who also turns out to produce every other female pop star of the moment. Our voyage of discovery turned out  not to be one of French semioticians but of Swedish pop producers! This is the troubling Nordic landscape in which we find ourselves. Truly, must everything become ABBA?

The Real Estella by Grace Lovelace

Ellen “Nelly” Ternan at 19, a year after meeting Charles Dickens.

Like the work of Charles Dickens itself, The Invisible Woman, the new film about Dickens’ mistress Ellen Ternan, is more radical than it appears. The 45-year-old Dickens met Ellen “Nelly” Ternan, 18,  when she appeared in a play he was producing and starring in. She stepped into the role previously played by his daughter Kate, as he decided to take the show on the road. She also became his companion for the next 12 years, his last.

Nelly Ternan has generally been treated as a somewhat ambiguous footnote to Dickens’ life. In this, his biographers took their cue from Dickens himself, who expended great energy wiping out the traces of his late life love affair. A famous man in mid-life spends enormous time and money on a pretty young actress? Generations of Dickens’ scholars have found this behavior unreadable. “Family friend,” had been the somewhat gingerly consensus, at least until the English biographer Claire Tomalin stepped in with her 1990 book on Ternan, her family, and their association with the  famous novelist.

Then, as now, the theater represented a sort of liminal space, on in which real world rules don’t always apply. Actresses, too, as Tomalin explains, though disapproved of, were also allowed unusual liberties. While regarded as outlaws, with an inevitable aura of prostitution, they were also, when successful, granted a remarkable degree of autonomy in Victorian England,  frequently moving between relationships or having children with different partners, within or without marriage. Nelly came from a well-established theatrical family, with roots and connections. She also seemed quite young and innocent, most people agreeing she seemed more immature than her 18 years. A potent combination, as it turned out, when it came to Charles Dickens.

For Dickens, the putting on of plays seems to have filled a number of purposes: providing an at least temporary escape from his by then unhappy marriage, and an opportunity to hang out with his Bohemian friend, Wilkie Collins. (Collins wrote the play, The Frozen Deep, in which Ternan and her sister appeared. He was also involved in many of Dickens’ other theatrical endeavors.)  A fellow novelist (The Moonstone, The Woman in White), Collins was also a notorious rogue:  a connoisseur of actresses, in fact, maintaining several households over his adulthood, while remaining unmarried. A man of the continent and of the theatre, he was the perfect companion for the restless Dickens, enacting freedoms the infinitely more famous, and famously virtuous Dickens could not allow himself.

When he eventually decided to sack his wife, Dickens seemed to have encountered surprisingly little resistance. He simply spun the story to his advantage. His wife, he wrote to the papers, had never taken an interest in the children, though she bore him ten. She was cow-like and crazy, he claimed, an unfit companion for his genius. According to Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman, from which the film is adapted, she was pensioned off to a small house north of Regent’s Park, away from the rest of the family. Georgina Hogarth, her sister, who had long enjoyed a position of power and favor with her celebrity brother-in-law, was happy to officially become matron of the house. She also publicly backed Dickens claims.

Dickens turned out to be quite masterful in shaping his public image, even well after his death. The beloved Dickens of a Christmas Carol didn’t just happen, he needed producing and stage managing. To that end, he blackmailed, wrote in code, used pseudonyms and most of all, burned anything incriminating and ordered others to do the same. His daughter Kate, writing much later to George Bernard Shaw, said she looked forward to letters surfacing “in which the real man is revealed, minus his Sunday clothes and all shams, and with his heart and soul burning like jewels in a dark place! I say there may be such letters and they may be one day given to the world” (quoted by Tomalin, p. 236). As it turned out she underestimated the extent of her father's control.
But history, like family, is an unruly thing. When Tomalin began to fill in the missing pieces, there were plenty of clues to be found. Ralph Fiennes takes up this material, as adapted by screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady), to give us a life not so much invisible as willfully erased. Tomalin’s Invisible Woman reads like a detective story; the drama lies in piecing together the evidence into the most likely scenario. What does it mean for a Victorian couple to disappear to France, as Dickens and Nelly appear to have done?  She posits that Ternan became pregnant and was spirited away to a morally flexible Gallic retreat, rather a tradition for English gentlemen of the period. Financial records for leases and sums of money under false names, frequent appointments with “N” in a lost appointment book? Along with testimony from Dickens’ children, several of whom made sure to go on the record before their deaths, the story of Dickens and Nelly Ternan began to take shape.
     While covering the same material, Fiennes movie takes a somewhat different approach.  His film, detailing the somewhat mercenary arrangements of an influential Victorian figure, plays out against our expectations for a love story, specifically one about an artistic couple  bucking convention. There’s not much transcendent here, the film makes clear, and Dickens alone had sufficient power to alter conventions to his own needs.

Fiennes gets a lot across of this across, very economically, in the early scene rehearsing The Frozen Deep.  His own theatrical experience, as well as growing up in a large, artistic family, no doubt came in handy. The casting is particularly effective: Felicity Jones, a young British actress unfamiliar to me, is attractive and fairly effective, but clearly unable to compete in terms of star power with her elder co-stars, evoking her youth and experience in what must have been an overwhelming situation. Ralph Fiennes plays Dickens and, in an extremely clever bit of casing, Kristin Scott Thomas is Nelly’s mother, Fanny Ternan. We cannot help but be reminded of their archetypal love story together, The English Patient, every time they are together in a scene. But now Thomas has been transformed to chaperone and somewhat unwilling broker. A sense of things are askew, of displacement, is the effortless result of this particular reunion.  Kristin Scott Thomas is flawless, as usual. She conveys a weary grasp of the situation, as well as a determination not to let it veer out of control. If there is a weak link, in terms of the acting, it is Fiennes himself.  When I first heard he was playing Dickens, I found it hard to imagine; how could this slow-moving, introspective actor play the tiny, hyper Dickens? (The very best man for that job, it strikes me, would have been Willy Wonka era-Gene Wilder. He alone could convey his manic vision and zany leadership style. And the costumes could essentially remain the same.) Though Fiennes acquits himself as Dickens, his acting in this film does not rise to the level of his directing.

When Nelly has been discussed as part of Dickens’ public life, it has been as the inspiration for Estella in Great Expectations, his late, great novel writing during this time. Although she may have initially appeared to him as a figure of virtue and passivity, in the long term he seems to have found her, and her family, rather less pliable.  Estella, an intractable beauty controlled by powerful backstage forces: this  does seem to bear some resemblance to his dealings with the Ternan clan. In the beginning he used his influence to get them parts and rent them houses; as time went on he procured her older sister Fanny a position as governess to Anthony Trollope’s widower brother, a job that quickly morphed into wife. Fanny began to publish regularly, at top prices, in Dickens publication All the Year Round. In the twelve years of his association with the family, before his death, they established themselves quite firmly in the nexus of his financial and literary connections. Later historians had grounds to wonder is this family was simply one of his ongoing charitable endeavors; they seem to have represented a package deal.

If at times these Ternan claims may have seemed onerous, they did confer one real advantage to Dickens: once established in respectable marriages, the Ternans were just as anxious to hide the true nature of the connection as he was himself. The extent to which Nelly was erased from the official Dickens story was due, largely, to her own efforts.
Nelly seems to have picked up Dickens knack for fictionalizing her own life. After his death she shaved a neat decade of her age, conveniently refreshing her maidenhood to marry a much young clergyman. Together they founded a school, coincidentally in Margate, the setting for much of Dickens’ Great Expectations.  She also had a son. Scenes from her life in Margate punctuate the film, which is told in flashbacks. These scenes of her helping to run the school, striding along the shoreline, and staring moodily into her first editions of Dickens, are some of the film’s weakest. Part of the point seems to be to establish the connection between Nelly and the real life elderly local cleric, coincidentally a huge Dickens fan, to whom she confided her secret and who eventually spilled the beans, establishing one of the important links in the chain of Nelly evidence. But this legalistic accounting, evident too in the scenes regarding Nelly’s probable stillbirth (closeup on Dickens signing the French death certificate, using one of his many Nelly-related pseudonyms), sits uneasily with the doomy romanticism.

After Dickens is gone, so too, largely, is the point of the film. Pasting in what are basically sequences from The French Lieutenant’s Woman does not, unfortunately, add depth to the portrait of Nelly Ternan, who seems to have been in point of fact  proactive in the extreme, not at all prone to depressive trances on the pier. She went on to live to a very old age, the Dickens relationship only discovered by her son much later, as he attempted to make sense of the financial records and mementos she left behind.

I saw this film as part of a series of early  industry screenings, accompanying my sister, who happens to be a SAG member. The showing of The Invisible Woman was sparsely attended, there was muttering about boredom on the way out. Very much in contrast to the later showing of  Out of the Furnace , the testosterone and violence fueled vehicle featuring powerhouse performances by Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, and Casey Affleck, as well as a standard bit part by Zoe Saldana as girlfriend/pre-school teacher. “Brave!” and “startling!” was the consensus on that one. The Invisible Woman is a small movie, not a perfect one, but it is unusual in having a genuinely feminist vision. From where I sit, that is startling.

Talkin' Orson Welles Blues by Grace Lovelace

My Lunches with Orson.Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles. Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Biskind. Henry Holt and Company, 306 pp., $28

In this collection of short lunchtime talks--tapas, if you will-- you get the kind of Rabelaisian stream-of-consciousness concoction that could only be delivered by a man wearing “bifurcated tents to which, rather idly, lapels, pocket flaps, buttons were attached in order to suggest a conventional suit.” (Gore Vidal’s memorable description of Orson Welles’ late-era costume, as quoted in Peter Biskind’s introduction.) Within the ambiance of late-seventies-early eighties Ma Maison we are treated to a series of conversations between two champion talkers--the legendary Orson Welles, and his spunky sidekick Henry Jaglom. (For the record, while I’ve always been underwhelmed by Henry Jaglom’s films, he proves a stimulating foil to Orson Welles here.) The waiters come and go; celebrities mingle; meanwhile the history of Hollywood’s golden age is recounted, in swift and sometimes spiteful bursts, by one of the world’s master storytellers.

I must say, I loved this book so much more than I expected. The conversations, taped at Orson Welles request by Henry Jaglom, have been masterfully edited by Peter Biskind. We get the most delicious, unfiltered gossip, but also a sharp sense of environment. Most importantly, a character emerges: the aging boy genius, still pushing for the next big project, but in the meantime enjoying leisurely meals and angling for another lucrative commercial. (These were the Paul Masson years, after all; a contract which provided Welles major income for this period. In an amusing aside, he talks about how low-rent the Masson advertising execs were, and how much they resented his automatic attempts to improve the copy even as he spoke it.)

We learn about the evolution of Hollywood through the prism of the Ma Maison chicken salad:

OW: Don’t get tiresome about the chicken salad.

HJ: Why am I being tiresome, Orson? I want to get it the way it always is, without the capers. The waiter doesn’t understand.

OW: This is the way the chef makes it now.

HJ: They keep writing in the papers that, ever since Wolfgang left, this place has gone downhill. And his restaurant, in turn, has become the number-one one. He’s begging me to get you to come to it.

OW: I’ll never go.

HJ: Why?

OW:: I don’t like Wolgang. He’s a little shit. I think he’s a terrible little man.

HJ: Why?

OW: I don’t know. God made him that way. What do you mean, “Why?”

And against the bustling restaurant backdrop, celebrities are sighted, summoned, gossiped about and rebuffed. Jack Lemmon stops by and chats for a chapter. Richard Burton and Liz Taylor are sent back to their own table, much to Henry Jaglom’s chagrin. The two friends touch on innumerable topics drawn from Welles 50+ years on the public stage, but, inevitably, certain names keep floating to the surface: John Houseman, enjoying a maddening career surge at the time, consistently unkind to his former Mercury Theatre partner; Rita Hayworth, partly because of Jaglom’s fascination with Welles’ gorgeous former wife;  Citizen Kane, of course; and, most amusingly, Welles main Shakespearean competition, Laurence Olivier.  In Welles’  book, this book,  no one could be stupider, vainer, or foist more pig-headed interpretations on an innocent public than “Larry”:

HJ: How is Larry? Has anyone heard anything more about his health?
OW: I hear all kinds of stories, none of them very cheerful. He has three kinds of cancer. It’s particularly a shame, because Larry wanted to be so beautiful. I caught him once, when I came backstage to his dressing room after a performance, he was staring at himself with such love, such ardor, in the mirror. He saw me over his shoulder, embarrassed at my catching him in such an intimate moment. Without missing a beat, though, and without taking his eyes off himself, he told me that when he looked at himself in the mirror, he was so in love with his own image it was terribly hard for him to resist going down on himself. That was his great regret, he said. Not to be able to go down on himself!

This is a big ego, but surprisingly, the flip side of that ego is a major fragility and, frequently, an open-heartedness and compassion towards the other players. For example, it’s obvious both Jaglom and editor Biskind want him to strike back at Pauline Kael, who, in truth, did him a gross disservice in her essay on Citizen Kane. When Jaglom brings it up,  Welles just nods--she was wrong--but continues, “I love Pauline, because she writes at length about actors. Which nobody writing about movies does. II think she’s wrong a lot of the time, but she’s always interesting.” .Refreshing, particularly given the venom regularly directed her way by powerful men who found themselves on  the business end of her pen.
The book conveys the depressing hustle of Welles late career, as Jaglom and he plot his next move, only to meet disappointment after disappointment.  Jaglom, to be honest, seems more hopeful about the prospects than Welles at this point, who is always glimpsing the failure in any possible success. This portion of the book reaches it’s heartbreaking nadir in a meeting with an HBO exec who offends Welles with her indifference. “When I get that dead look, I’m dead!, he fumes.” “I can’t do it.” We witness the whole sorry thing.

His fatal ADD is on full display in these Ma Maison lunches, it’s true; but so too  is the brilliance that allowed him to shrug off one of the greatest movie of all time at age 25.

Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles

A Blog for Every Crackpot by Grace Lovelace

Joseph Gordon-Levitt directs Don Jon.

                 

Your mom calls you up, urging you to see the Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie about porn addiction. For your new blog, she says. You suspect you’ve hit rock bottom.

Relax, Jay McInerney, because it turns out that Don Jon is an extremely wholesome porn addiction comedy, the kind your mother could (and evidently does) love. Stocked full of vitamin rich Positive Attitudes Toward women, and low in nasty saturated-fat Laughs. Indeed, there is a sensitive, seventies vibe about the whole thing--you’d swear it arrives covered in sprouts, or remnants of that ancient human artifact, pubic hair.

This in spite of it’s contemporary, Jersey Shores milieu. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays  the bartending womanizer of the film’s title. (He also wrote and directed.) He has met the woman of his dreams (Scarlett Johansson) but they are both beginning to suspect his heart really belongs to internet porn. Into this troubled scenario arrives Julianne Moore as an emissary from another era, much like Jane Fonda in Coming Home. She will rehabilitate him, not from the Vietnam War, but from his porn-fueled compulsive self-stimulation. Reader, they make love.

In one of many jabs at conventional romantic comedy,  it turns out that Barbara, the Scarlett Johansson character, is addicted to her own voracious fantasy life--a retro, coercive marriage track symbolized by her rapt consumption of the romantic films she drags him to-- films that bore him stiff, even as she finds his porn completely disgusting. These female fantasies are just as destructive of real-life happiness, Gordon-Levitt implies, as the more obvious objectification of porn. Considering the degradations I’ve suffered at the hands of rom-coms over the years, I can only, wearily, concur.

Gordon-Levitt has always been likeable, in movies like Inception and 500 Days of Summer, and I was rooting for him as he works to break out of side-kick status, to transform himself not just  into leading man but auteur. He literally flexes his muscles, expands and hardens here in his role as an emotionally closed-off body builder. ( I really have no idea how he got those muscles.) And then he turns himself back again, into a sensitive listener, sans hair gel and in-your-face attitude. By the end of the film, he’s practically eating quiche.

In a lot of ways, Don Juan reminded me of another recent vehicle by an actor turned writer-director, Lake Bell’s In Another World, in which she shed her typecasting as a  beautiful, demanding vixen in order to play a voice-over nerd in overalls. In both cases the premises seem kind of original, the messages worthy, but the laughs were pitiably few and far between. Even though the triple-hyphen credit (actor-writer-director) looks fabulous, and the multi-tasking undoubtedly saves money, these wunderkinder should maybe have sprung for a writer-writer, or at least  some kind of joke technician.

Julianne Moore joins Joseph Gordon-Levitt in class .

Don Jon was redeemed for me, however, by the presence of Julianne Moore. Her character is, I suppose, as big a stereotype in its way as Gordon-Levitt’s macho Saturday Night Fever character or Scarlett Johansson’s poison sex-pot. She is middle-aged and unstable, also terribly chic, sexy, and beautiful. In short, she’s Julianne Moore. But I give Gordon-Levitt extra credit for this particular twist in the romantic comedy genre: it’s not often Scarlett Johansson gets rejected in favor of a stoned nutcase twenty-five years her senior.

Go ahead and call me a sucker for falling for Manic Pixie, Mrs. Robinson division. Do you think it bothers me? I’m already sitting here writing a movie blog for my immediate family. That reminds me, my sister said the last one was was way too long. Time to wrap things up.

Let’s do the time warp again soon. Love, Actually

Good Ol' Freda: Netflix Movie Review

Freda Kelly in the Beatles years

For Beatles fans, the idea that there is a major player in the band’s story we are unfamiliar with seems absurd. Hasn’t every aspect of this saga been done to death? Nonetheless, here she is, in the recent documentary, Good Ol’ Freda: Freda Kelly, secretary and official liaison to the Beatles’ fan club from 1961 to 1972. There she was, almost from the band’s beginning to a bit past the end, and she’s telling her tale at last.

    Part of the charm of this documentary is the way it plays with our sense of scale and perspective. We are present as the world turns its attention toward the Beatles up to 11, but we view the whole thing from the point of view of a naive local teenager.  It’s like getting chambermaid’s view to the royal palace. Those expecting the chambermaid to show off the dirty laundry, however, are in for a let-down. While she hints that there are some secrets she still maintains, the filmmakers, Ryan White and Kathy McCabe, don’t push her much about the private lives of the Beatles. Her own story, that of a more-or-less ordinary person, who happened to find herself near the white hot center of the Sixties, is allowed to suffice. (It’s also, perhaps, true that Freda’s own steely resolve continued to disallow that form of prying. Almost the beginning of her stint with the Beatles, she claims, she was offered bribes from the press in return for confidential Beatles information. She is not about to be tempted now.)

       Freda’s own story carries a strong whiff of the fairy tale about it, specifically, of Cinderella. After having lost her mother as a toddler,  she was living with her loving but rather stern father when the Beatles catapulted into her life.  A working woman at 17, part of a local typing pool, she happened across  the band at the Cavern, which became something of a second home, and the fan scene surrounding them, which formed a kind of family. Hired by Epstein to handle correspondence for the burgeoning band, she was swept into their circle just as they emerged on the international stage. In spite of her direct access to what became the biggest stars in the world, she never lost her sense of kinship with their teenage fan base. She brought a girlish fervor  to her job, frequently staying up until four in the morning to reply to as many letters as possible. Her integrity verged on the fanatical: if Freda sent you a pillowcase she said Ringo had slept on, you could take that to the bank. (She once fired a group of young local assistants whom she caught sending off someone else’s hair instead of Paul’s. The counterfeit hairist still seems uttterly perplexed by the episode  fifty years later. What did she do wrong?) For Freda, it’s clear, maintaining the Beatles fan club was a calling.

   As we experience the growing phenomenon of the Beatles through the eyes of this young Liverpoolian, things become rather Alice in Wonderlandish: everything gets bigger  than she could possibly have imagined. Her first sense of the enormity of what was to come arrives when she unthinkingly gives out her home address as the official location of the Beatles fan club. Her father grows increasingly apoplectic as cart after cart of Beatles notes, presents and requests begin to arrive at his doorstep, burying his own bills and the odd personal letter in their midst.

Her second major shock came several years later,with the official tribute the city of Liverpool paid to the Beatles at the Town Hall.

Looking out from the balcony behind the Beatles and their families, she has an almost psychedelic experience as her gaze telescoped outwards. People, masses of them, expanding further than her eye could take in, well beyond the Liverpool horizon. We get a sense of the sweetness and innocence she had then as she looks back on the episode; their fame didn’t hit her properly until she saw  they had become bigger than all of Liverpool!  

    Liverpool itself looms heavily over the film;  Freda continued on as secretary to the Beatles  from Liverpool, tending her ailing father, even after the Beatles had moved to London. She lives there still, in her own row house. We catch glimpses as she moves about her daily life, shops, drives to work, but the view we get from the Town Hall as she relives this  moment from 1963 is the most sweeping and layered. We see the ornate buildings, the pride of a once wealthy and important port city, but one which today looks empty,  largely abandoned, and grimey around the edges. Besides the sweetness of her own youthful wonder , we also get a sense of the inexorableness of time--of loss, and decay.
    Freda, it’s fair to say, worked the 18-hour-days of a Silicon Valley employee in a promising start-up. And what was Beatlemania, after all,  if not the largest social network the world had ever known,  linking people on various continents through the crude early code of Paul-John-George-Ringo, a system nonetheless capable of generating shifts in consciousness and vast international rumors. “Paul is Dead.” Or is he?

The metaphor takes us only so far--the Apple of Lennon/McCartney was not that of Steve Jobs or even of Gwyneth Paltrow. In other words, Freda had no real stake in the company, nor did her girlish good looks, hard work, or long hours translate, in the end, to much in the way of hard cash.  So what happens to Cinderella after she attends the ball, finds it perfectly delightful, then returns to her somewhat pinched life in the north of England?

    Freda herself expresses no dissatisfaction with this outcome, even as she’s filmed sifting through her few remaining boxes of Beatles memorabilia up in the attic. “I could have been a millionaire,” she muses, if  only she had hoarded the loads of stuff she once had. Instead she distributed it to fans, even as she continued to answer their mail for years, off the clock, a few letters at a time. She philosophizes a bit towards the end about the trajectory of her life.  “People have the wrong idea about fame,” she remarks, then points out that it did not save John and George from their early deaths (She’s too kind to point out fame actually ushered them towards those deaths.). The filmmakers clearly laude her modest, anti-materialist approach to life, and honor her life with their own insistently small-scale documentation.
    Yet a sense of grievance hangs about the film, in the person of her daughter. Interviewed several times on her mother’s couch, she looks like a millennial version of her mother, mod-haircut but also nose-ring.  She is lovely, but faces the camera with a guarded, distrustful expression. This is evidently a young woman with a grudge. She asks questions otherwise  unexpressed in the film:  Why didn’t her mother see any of the wealth she helped to create? Why does she continue to work full-time as a secretary well past retirement age?  She appears suspicious, above all, that once again the big shots have come knocking at her mother’s door, only to depart without sharing the dividends.

Salinger Review by Grace Lovelace (Six Degrees of Salinger)

J.D. Salinger writing Catcher in the Rye.

Shane Salerno’s Salinger arrives with many of the cheesy touches one would expect from a one-time Michael Bay collaborator, but also a feast of new information. Of particular interest are  a host of new images of Salinger himself, as well as interviews with one-time intimates. Following his death, everyone, is seems,  is anxious to spill the beans, to dance a little jig on the grave of Old Grey. This includes, surprisingly enough, fellow patriarchs of American literature such as E.L. Doctorow and Tom Wolfe. While it may cross our minds that these  writers have a strong financial interest in filmic representations of their books, and perhaps in cultivating relationships with producer Harvey Weinstein,  let’s set that aside for the moment. This is no time for our people hunting hat. (But, wait, what is Philip Seymour Hoffman doing here, pontificating on fame and artistic integrity? Is he starring in the upcoming biopic? And David Shields? He wrote the 800-page blockbuster tie-in, of course. Excuse my distractedness, my Holden Caulfield-brand bullshit detector keeps going off.)

There are, however,  some significant payoffs to the Weinsteins throwing their weight around. Here they are, in the order in which they appear:

1) An array of images of Salinger’s life as a soldier, like that above of “Jerry” working on an early version of Catcher in the Rye while on active combat duty. (He carried pages of the manuscript with him to the beaches of Normandy on D Day.)  Salinger, it seems, was part of a very tight-knit counterintelligence ring. They stayed in touch for the rest of their lives; some of them took pictures.

2) Footage of Jean Miller, the basis for the Esmé character  in  For Esmé—with Love & Squalor, Salinger’s breakthrough work for the New Yorker concerning a shell-shocked war veteran.  Fifteen when they met on a Daytona beach in the early fifties, she recounts how he pursued her until, on a weekend trip to Montreal she initiated sexual contact. The next day they were through.
3) A timetable and description of the unpublished Salinger works to be released  by the estate over the course of the next decade.

In terms of actual revelations, that’s pretty much it. For those paying attention, the Salinger fortress was breached years ago, stone by stone,  as memoirs were published  by his daughter and girlfriend. Rather than covering new ground, Salerno borrows liberally from these works, as well as from Kenneth Slawenski’s 2011 biography J. D. Salinger, which established  important connections between Salinger’s fiction and his largely untreated PTSD. Indeed, apart from the photographic scoops, Salerno’s  examination of Salinger’s war years appears pedestrian and without nuance in comparison to Slawenski’s book on the same subject. In particular, the short shrift he gives Salinger’s experience as a Jew who happened to be among first Americans to enter the concentration camps, and who , due to his fluent German, was additionally given the task of debriefing camp personnel, is a particularly grievous gap. Salinger’s subsequent nervous breakdown is covered in the film without the groundwork allowing us to understand why it happened. That’s Hollywood.

Salerno’s documentary has been criticized, most vocally by Maynard herself, for its cursory treatment of Salinger’s  long string of affairs with very young women. Having read Maynard’s memoir, the contrasts between the anger and angst-infused recollections of her book and her  affable persona in the film are striking. To give one example: in the film, she giggles as she remembers how they breakfasted, according to his strict views on health, on barely defrosted peas. Eccentric, yes, but also mildly charming. In the book, however, the story is a little different: She tells how  he was  always very controlling and dictatorial about  exactly what, and how much,  they ate. When one evening they consumed what he deemed too much, he tutored her in the art of self-induced vomiting. Yes, the fifty-three-year-old J.D. Salinger coached a very appearance conscious teen in bulimia! This is  sinister stuff; and, predictably, given the basically respectful tenor of the film,  it does not make Salerno’s cut.

In the end, Shane Salerno and J.D. Salinger make for an exceedingly odd couple. While Salinger, whatever his other faults, always had an exquisite ear, Salerno is fatally tone deaf.  The film has been widely criticized for its “America’s Most Wanted” style reenactment segments, but also, not incidentally, for it’s (mis)use of music. The climactic, ear-splitting Thus Spake Zarathustra-style orchestration  that overlays the exclusive list of books to be published is laughable, and ends up undermining the urgency of anything we learn. Things actually go downhill from there.  In the film’s final sequence, we are informed in breathless text (there’s no other way to describe it), that after years of intermittent filming in Cornish, the filmmakers received a phone call asking them to be at a particular corner at such-a-such a time. Very cloak and dagger. Once again the tabloid headline: “Exclusive: Last Known Footage of J.D. Salinger.” We then see an exceedingly frail J.D. Salinger make his way to a massive SUV. Taking his seat,  he grimaces manically (a smile?) through the window. He is then driven away by an oddly radiant and youthful redhead.Over this sequence plays jubilant music strongly reminiscent of the instrumental section in Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill. Salerno’s message is clear: a moment of joyful reconciliation! At last!

To what is Salinger’s supposedly  reconciling himself? Salerno himself and/or the Weinstein Company? The droves of seekers who have showed up at his doorstep over the years? Perhaps something as grand as the culture at large; Salinger certainly suggests as much. E.L. Doctorow posits early on that becoming a recluse was simply a brilliant PR move on Salinger’s part, and various pilgrims tell their stories of how Salinger was not, in reality, all that unapproachable, even striking some as solicitous about their welfare.  

In spite of a certain narrative momentum to this understanding (He liked us! He really liked us!) unfortunately it makes precisely zero sense. Salinger’s decision to withdraw his work from the marketplace, in possession of a large and receptive reading public as well as an accommodating, remunerative publishers, even as he continued to produce novel after novel, remains utterly unprecedented. The SUV scene is simply another perplexing turn in an enormous mystery, the final maneuver of a crafty counterintelligence officer who never called off his war with the world. On the other hand,  it  does seem promising that several of the upcoming  books deal directly  with his war experience. Maybe a 50 year yoga retreat (another work is reputed to be a Vedanta religious manual) will turn out to be just what the doctor ordered. I for one am keeping the faith--a bit longer.
*Addendum: Following the enormously negative reaction to this film's original release, it was re-edited. As a result, the film you see on Netflix or PBS may be slightly different regarding music cues, etc. And it's apparently been given a new title.