Coming Through The Rye movie review (2016)

Chris Cooper is hardly a Salinger lookalike but he has no problem playing gruff and irked, so he’s just fine as the intruded-upon novelist. When he hears why Jamie’s come, it’s clear he’s been importuned on this same subject countless times before. "Elia Kazan offered me a million dollars for The Catcher in the Rye,” he tells Jamie. If I didn’t give it to him, why would I give it to you? The boy retorts that his play was written “with a pure heart,” and because 99% of its dialogue came from Salinger, it renders the book exactingly. 

Salinger replies that the book is meant to play in the theater of every reader’s mind, and thus any stage or film version would inevitably involve an interpretation that would dilute and distort the reader’s relationship to the original. This is a powerful argument, and Jamie has no comeback. But that doesn’t mean he leaves the author’s house assuming he can’t stage the play he’s written.

While The Catcher in the Rye was published at the beginning of the reputedly buttoned-down and conformist ‘50s, its rebellious urges arguably found an even more sympathetic audience during the social upheavals of the late ‘60s, a connection that “Coming Through the Rye” captures nicely. And while Jamie for much of the story seems far less troubled and anguished than Holden Caulfield, a third-act plot twist (no spoilers here) deepens his character in a way that makes his story more credible and satisfying.

A side note: Back in the ‘90s this reviewer tried to get in touch with J.D. Salinger after writing an article in the New York Times about an upcoming Lincoln Center festival of Iranian cinema that included a film adapted from a Salinger novel. “Pari,” by the great director Dariush Mehrjui, derives from Franny and Zooey and owes its existence to the fact that there are no copyright agreements between the U.S. and Iran.

After Salinger’s representatives threatened to send U.S. marshals to seize the film, it was spirited out of Lincoln Center and I wrote to the author urging that he at least look at the film. Just as Jamie assumed that Salinger would change his mind if he read his play, I thought that if he saw “Pari,” he would find it truly fascinating and let it be shown. And like Jamie, I heard nothing back from him or his agent.

But ultimately, I can’t complain, because I’m hugely grateful that Salinger didn’t let his books be made into movies. If he had, by now there’d probably be five or six versions of The Catcher in the Rye, all groaningly inferior to the version we’ve all directed in our minds. In that sense, “Coming Through the Rye” may be the closest we’ll ever get cinematically to the novel. And in being so far away from it, it’s close enough.

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