‘My Salinger Year’: Berlin Review

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The Berlinale opens with a muted adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s popular memoir

In this staid, somewhat muted adaptation of the acclaimed memoir by Joanna Rakoff, Margot Qualley plays the author as a young writer who comes to New York in the mid-90s with big dreams but soon finds herself in a menial job at a literary agency run by a grand dame (Sigourney Weaver) who insists that staff still use typewriters and regards computers with a patrician disdain.

The agency represents the famously reclusive author J D Salinger, and Joanna is tasked with reading and destroying the letters sent to him by adoring fans by the sackful each week. Her instructions are to reply, using one of the stock answers which have remained unaltered since 1963. But the letters from “Jerry’s” fans touch a nerve, their voices becoming characters in Joanna’s own life story...

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