The Wackness
Directed by Jonathan Levine
Poor J.D. Salinger. He captured lightning in a bottle in 1951 with his singular portrait of a lovely, depressed, too-good-for-this-corrupt-world boy in Catcher in the Rye, and even now, more than half a century after its publication and more than four decades after Salinger went silent as a writer, he is constantly challenged by whippersnappers who want to supersede his creation with a late-model Holden Caulfield for our times.
These days, would-be Salingers are all young filmmakers, and their Catcher in the Rye imitations are self-consciously “personal” movies with standard-issue rotten parents, irresponsible psychiatrists, and a lot of drugs.
Following on the heels of Garden State, Thumbsucker, The Chumscrubber, and Charlie Bartlett, we must now reckon with The Wackness. Its Holden is Luke Shapiro, who has just graduated from a fancy Manhattan private school and is on his way to a mediocre college. The year is 1994, for no particular reason, except that it allows its characters to rant about how newly elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani is making life more difficult for the city’s graffiti artists and pot smokers. Luke Shapiro has to watch out for Giuliani because he deals marijuana.
(Maybe writer-director Jonathan Levine thought Giuliani would be the Republican presidential nominee and that would add a little kick to his movie. I would say “oops,” except that I am the last person to judge him for such a decision, since I wrote a book in 2006 whose central thesis was that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee for president.)
Luke is careful and precise. He knows how to convince his customers to buy the quantity of pot that will make him the most money. He knows how not to get caught. The Jamaican crime boss who supplies him with his weed likes and respects him.
And yet Luke is a sad, sad boy. He is friendless and alone. Even though he supplies the hip kids at his school, they don’t invite him to their parties. His parents do nothing but fight, and we soon learn he is working as hard as he does because he is trying to save his pathetic father from a ruinous business failure. The only person who will listen to him is a psychiatrist named Squires (a scenery-chomping Ben Kingsley), who is the stepfather of the most beautiful girl in school-and is one of his best clients.
His depression has rendered him inarticulate to the point of muteness. Were it not for the patois he has learned from hip-hop, he would barely have a vocabulary at all. The beautiful girl sums it all up in the line that gives the movie its title: “I look at the world and see all the dopeness. You see the wackness.” (Dope = fun. Wack = bad.)
That line exemplifies everything that is wrong with this overdone, glum, self-conscious, and self-righteous bildungsroman. It doesn’t sound like anything anyone has ever said; it sounds like a line written by an adult trying to imagine himself as a kid again. The same is true of Levine’s utterly false characterization of his protagonist. The Luke Shapiro who is barely able to speak cannot possibly be the same Luke Shapiro who manages to accumulate $26,000 in a month’s time to bail his father out of debt. Luke the drug dealer is such a disciplined and determined worker that one can easily imagine him growing up and becoming a film director with two hip movies under his belt at the age of 32. (Levine is 32, although he says in interviews that he never dealt.) But Luke the depressed boy seems unlikely even to make it through his first week of college.
Luke is the only person in the movie who sacrifices for his family, who takes risks for love, who dives into the ocean to save someone from a suicide attempt. Everyone else we see is just too far gone to care. We are supposed to think that, like Holden Caulfield, Luke is one of nature’s noblemen. But he isn’t, and that’s not only because he’s a drug dealer.
The reason whippersnappers like Jonathan Levine haven’t been able to knock Salinger off his throne as the spokesman for adolescence is that they fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of Catcher in the Rye. Teenagers have been falling in love with Holden Caulfield for 57 years because Salinger made sure to endow his creation with energy, brio, and bite. Holden is not hangdog and sallow, like Luke Shapiro. Rather, he gives perfect voice to every adolescent emotion, from the way he rails against “phonies” to his observation that “all morons hate it when you call them a moron” to his amused and amusing self-portrait: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.”
Catcher in the Rye is, in many ways, a pernicious book, one of the opening salvos in the ruinous cultural assault on adulthood. But fair is fair. Salinger was up to something interesting. Would that one could say the same about The Wackness or any of its forebears. There is no need for a new Holden Caulfield. The old one is quite enough.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
