on Feb 20th, 2006Winter Passing (not gas)
Were you the kind of teenager who read Catcher in the Rye and felt so connected to Holden Caulfield that you couldn’t imagine being yourself anymore? Or were you more attracted to the writer, J.D. Salinger, who created the character?
After the success of Catcher, J.D. pretty much disappeared from public life. The royalties on the book afforded him this luxury. Rumors occasionally circulate that he’s still writing short stories for The New Yorker under a pen name. It’s strange how being reclusive generates the need to tell a story about the absence. Absence, I guess, implies a loss of something, a missed opportunity to emotionally connect.
This new movie with Ed Harris called Winter Passing has been described as a not so hidden gesture toward J.D. Salinger’s reclusive existence. Ed Harris plays a writer who now lives in a garage, sharing a household with a musician (Will Farrell) and a grad student (Emilia Warner).
Zooey Deschanel plays Harris’s daughter, an actress, who has been contacted by a book editor who dangles a $100,000 deal for her father’s love letters to her mother so she can publish them. The daughter in turn visits her father, I suppose to flesh out whatever is left over of her conscious for him as a dad — since she’s weighing the idea of selling him out versus taking the money for a love that somehow passed her by.
There’s an off feeling conveyed in the trailer. This is a father-daughter story, but it looks like it got cluttered up with some peripheral characters. The loneliness and isolation of being a writer may seem boring on the surface, but it deserves screen time if you’re going to understand the arc from being initially successful to feeling a desperate need to escape from the world not of your own making. After all, writers invent worlds they want to live in; the thought of living in a media-created world is pointless.
So watch the trailer and judge for yourself whether its worth a trip to the theater or merely a spot in your Netflix queue.
The movie’s tagline: Sometimes you go looking for something you want. . . and find what you need.
