The images are gray, rain-streaked, and richly dank, and always in super-sharp focus. “Prisoners,” a sombrely impressive thriller in the style of “Mystic River” and “Zodiac,” was shot by the British cinematographer Roger Deakins, a master of bleakness (he also did “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men”). Dreariness has its own kind of poetry—it certainly colors the mood of this harrowing tale, which is set in a Pennsylvania suburb. It’s a seemingly normal, quiet place, where fervid religion and rage against God exist side by side; it also has a history of missing children. Written by an American, Aaron Guzikowski, and directed by a Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, “Prisoners,” like “Mystic River” and “Zodiac,” is a thriller that digs into the dark cellars of American paranoia and aggression. Two couples, one African-American (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and one white (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello), are celebrating Thanksgiving together when their two young daughters go outside to play, and immediately vanish. Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the ace local police detective, arrests a feebleminded, apparently hapless young man (Paul Dano) as a suspect but releases him after a couple of days—he doesn’t have enough evidence to hold him. Loki is both systematic and highly intuitive, and Gyllenhaal, looking haggard and eaten up inside, projects decency and obsessiveness in equal measure—that’s why he keeps getting cast as a cop in movies. But one of the fathers, Keller Dover (Jackman), insists that Loki isn’t doing enough, and he rampages through town searching for the girls, part anguished parent, part vigilante, part morally blind avenger.
Most detective stories drive toward reassurance. In the beginning, someone is missing, or someone has been murdered; corruption festers under the prosperous surface of life; the time is out of joint. A detective uses his reason, his specialized knowledge of how criminals think, and gradually, after many mistakes, solves the crime, exposes the corruption, and pulls the pieces of our existence back into a satisfying whole. Life makes sense, after all. But “Prisoners,” like “Mystic River,” breaks the genre’s conventions. Villeneuve has what I keep looking for in directors: a charged sense of the way the world actually works. Dover, similar to the Sean Penn character in “Mystic River”—a man who loses his daughter and goes mad—falls into moral anarchy. His job in life, he keeps saying, is to protect his family. He’s morally right and also disastrously wrong. Jackman, with a black Vandyke beard, seems more backwoods than suburban here, and he’s frightening. For once, he has something genuine to sink his claws into—the narrow, ignorant righteousness of American macho at its most extreme. Dover’s intervention gums up Loki’s ordered way of doing things, and the movie turns into, among other things, a rivalry between method and impulse, with Loki, unable to solve the crime and taunted by Dover, falling into a deep rage of his own.
“Prisoners,” despite its gathering anxiety, has some of the pleasures of ordinary thrillers. But Villeneuve, who previously directed “Incendies,” does volatile scenes without exaggeration; parts of the movie are exceedingly violent, though the violence isn’t “fun”—it makes you wince. (Horror-film fans will not like this picture; some of it is actually horrifying.) Villeneuve throws us into a complicated skein of abductions going back years without losing the urgency of the present. “Prisoners” is a challenge: you have to decide who’s right and who’s wrong at every turn, and, when it’s over, ambiguity, rather than the satisfactions of harmony, reigns. Life stays out of joint. This movie suggests that it’s never really been any other way.
The documentary “Salinger” can be safely recommended to people who know nothing about J. D. Salinger and to people who can never know too much about him. Those who read “The Catcher in the Rye” at fourteen and then feasted for decades on small scraps of information about the reclusive writer may relish a two-hour-and-nine-minute film that tells his story with the kind of emphasis and iteration that makes others—neither indifferent nor adulatory—squirm in irritation. “Salinger” is self-important, redundant, and interminable. The director, Shane Salerno, working with the critic David Shields (they have also produced a thick book based on their research), invests everything that Salinger did (or, mostly, didn’t do) with a thundering significance that might be considered excessive for a film about Tolstoy. Some of this portentous data-mining approaches absurdity. The filmmakers interview the husband of a reporter, Lacey Fosburgh, who got a telephone call from Salinger. It’s quite something, that telephone call: the husband re-creates the breathtaking excitement of it. When Salinger receives, in 1941, a two-line note from this magazine rejecting one of his stories, the note looms in closeup accompanied by anguished music on the soundtrack. At the end, as an old man near death, he is seen climbing into a car, and a title proclaims “These are the last recorded images of J. D. Salinger.” The movie is like a monstrous balloon that keeps re-inflating. If Salinger were around, he would reach for a pin.
In 1953, two years after the enormous success of “Catcher,” Salinger, a man easily aroused to embarrassment or derision, retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire, and remained there until his death, in 2010. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, he published a collection of his early short stories and compilations of longer works that appeared in The New Yorker, including “Franny” and “Zooey,” but his public inaccessibility quickly became, for many, an affront, a provocation, an outrage. Readers who felt that he had spoken to them directly in “Catcher” longed for a renewal of that intimacy. And the media demanded to know exactly what he desired them not to know: what was he doing up there? Over the years, hundreds of fans and young writers made the pilgrimage to Cornish and flung themselves against the wall of Salinger’s isolation. (One of them, now a middle-aged man, is interviewed at length in the movie. Salinger told him that he was a writer of fiction, not a teacher or a seer. The fan remains disappointed.) Publications like Life, Time, and the Times sent photographers and reporters to linger in cold and scratchy woods, or to wait for days across the street from the post office where Salinger picked up his mail, for a glimpse of him. One such photographer is interviewed. He got the shot, but it’s not clear whether we are meant to cheer his perseverance or wonder at the impudent foolishness of his task. Since the filmmakers are in effect on the same errand, they may not know.
“Salinger” might have been a portrait of the artist’s escape from the philistines were it not apparent to us, well before the end, that the filmmakers have become the most determined philistines of all. Salerno and Shields are in love with the celebrity-fame-exploitation racket that Salinger walked away from. They find old girlfriends who recite their dismaying experiences with the writer; they film literary lions—Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe—who seem to have no strong feeling about him, except, perhaps, envy of his sales; they attend to famous actors who have less interesting things to say about “Catcher” than ordinary readers might. Salerno doesn’t pull much out of these people, so he relies, with fetishistic attention, on still shots of Salinger’s long, melancholy face, with its crest of thick dark hair, its lips slightly twisted in saturnine amusement. But showing these photographs doesn’t yield any extra meaning. Desperate, Salerno indulges in dubious acts of documentary re-creation—repeated shots of a dark-haired fellow crashing through northern woods like an axe murderer in a shabby shocker. There is also an unfortunate sub-Brechtian spectacle in which a writer, typing away in a pool of light, sits before a large screen showing scenes of the Second World War and other events in Salinger’s life and (presumably) his unconscious.
The filmmakers insist that Salinger dominated mid-century American literature—but in that claim they are merely pumping up the importance of their own project, which took nine years to complete. How good was Salinger? Wilfrid Sheed said that “even in his best work Salinger was a recognizable graduate of commercial writing not art writing, a Billy Wilder not a Bresson.” He observed, of “Catcher,” that “very few classics are that easy to read, or that likable either.” But Sheed also recognized Salinger’s extraordinary skill, and virtually everyone has acknowledged his unforgettable voice, a comic and lyrical creation so fully expressive of distaste for the crass energies of our business civilization that many readers, battling their own anxieties and revulsion, never get it out of their heads; the voice, with its go-ahead rhythms and its gentle sadness, still works for them. The unhappiest thing about “Salinger” is that the filmmakers have attached themselves to everything about Salinger but his writing. ♦
