Luke the Unloved
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Luke the Unloved A cinematic Holden Caulfi eld or sensitive drug dealer? BY JOHN PODHORETZ The Wackness Directed by Jonathan Levine Poor J.D. Salinger. He captured lightning in a bottle...
...The old one is quite enough...
...Luke is careful and precise...
...Luke Shapiro has to watch out for Giuliani because he deals marijuana...
...Even though he supplies the hip kids at his school, they don’t invite him to their parties...
...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 diffi cult for the city’s graffi ti artists and pot smokers...
...His parents do nothing but fi ght, 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...
...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 terrifi c liar you ever saw in your life...
...It’s awful...
...Salinger was up to something interesting...
...We are supposed to think that, like Holden Caulfi eld, Luke is one of nature’s noblemen...
...Teenagers have been falling in love with Holden Caulfi eld for 57 years because Salinger made sure to endow his creation with energy, brio, and bite...
...He knows how to convince his customers to buy the quantity of pot that will make him the most money...
...It doesn’t sound like anything anyone has ever said...
...Dope = fun...
...Holden is not hangdog and sallow, like Luke Shapiro...
...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...
...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...
...That line exemplifi es everything that is wrong with this overdone, glum, self-conscious, and self-righteous bildungsroman...
...Were it not for the patois he has learned from hip-hop, he would barely have a vocabulary at all...
...Following on the heels of Garden State, Thumbsucker, The Chumscrubber, and Charlie Bartlett, we must now reckon with The Wackness...
...Luke is the only person in the movie who sacrifi ces for his family, who takes risks for love, who dives into the ocean to save someone from a suicide attempt...
...Catcher in the Rye is, in many ways, a pernicious book, one of the opening salvos in the ruinous cultural assault on adulthood...
...Its Holden is Luke Shapiro, who has just graduated from a fancy Manhattan private school and is on his way to a mediocre college...
...His depression has rendered him inarticulate to the point of muteness...
...And yet Luke is a sad, sad boy...
...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...
...Everyone else we see is just too far gone to care...
...These days, would-be Salingers are all young fi lmmakers, and their Catcher in the Rye imitations are self-consciously “personal” movies with standardissue rotten parents, irresponsible psychiatrists, and a lot of drugs...
...He captured lightning in a bottle in 1951 with his singular portrait of a lovely, depressed, too-goodforthis-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 latemodel Holden Caulfi eld for our times...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...But fair is fair...
...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...
...There is no need for a new Holden Caulfi eld...
...Levine is 32, although he says in interviews that he never dealt...
...The same is true of Levine’s utterly false characterization of his protagonist...
...Maybe writer-director Jonathan Levine thought Giuliani would be the Republican presidential nominee and that would add a little kick to his movie...
...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...
...Wack = bad...
...But Luke the depressed boy seems unlikely even to make it through his fi rst week of college...
...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...
...The Jamaican crime boss who supplies him with his weed likes and respects him...
...it sounds like a line written by an adult trying to imagine himself as a kid again...
...He knows how not to get caught...
...You see the wackness...
...But he isn’t, and that’s not only because he’s a drug dealer...
...Would that one could say the same about The Wackness or any of its forebears...
...He is friendless and alone...
...Luke the drug dealer is such a disciplined and determined worker that one can easily imagine him growing up and becoming a fi lm director with two hip movies under his belt at the age of 32...
...It’s terrible...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 44
