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My New York Year, review: The Devil Wears Prada with a literature degree

Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley in Philippe Falardeau's My New York Year
Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley in Philippe Falardeau's My New York Year
  • Dir: Philippe Falardeau. Starring: Margaret Qualley, Sigourney Weaver, Douglas Booth, Colm Feore, Brian F O’Byrne. 15 cert, 101 mins

In 1995, Joanna Rakoff took a job as a 23-year-old intern at Harold Ober Associates, one of New York City’s oldest literary agencies. Taxed with handling JD Salinger’s large volume of fan mail, she had regular dealings with the notoriously reclusive novelist over the phone, and would write a 2014 memoir about her experiences. That book was called My Salinger Year; since premiering in Berlin last February, the poised film adaptation by Canadian director Philippe Falardeau has undergone a title change to the more generic, less bookish My New York Year.

Buoyed by an appealing duet of star turns from Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver, Falardeau’s film struggles to shake off one obvious influence: as Salinger’s seasoned agent, Weaver has hard-to-impress hauteur and a white-streaked sweep of hair that makes this a lot like The Devil Wears Prada with a literature degree. But it’s a gentler, sadder little piece than that, with an earnestness about its main character’s aspirations that put me more in mind of the heroines Saoirse Ronan recently played for Greta Gerwig in 2017’s Lady Bird, and as another Jo of starry-eyed writerly tendencies in 2019’s Little Women.

Though 1995 is the year Rakoff (Qualley) stayed put in New York after graduating, ending one relationship by default and shacking up with a Norman Mailer fan called Don (solidly played by an unkempt Douglas Booth), the scenes at the agency are deliberately out of time. Framed photos of their most famous clients (Agatha Christie, Dylan Thomas, F Scott Fitzgerald) line the walls alongside embossed hardbacks. Thanks to the disdain of queen bee Margaret (Weaver) for such new-fangled irritants as computers and email, they do things the old-fashioned way.

Joanna pretends she can use a typewriter, though it takes her months to get up to speed. And one of her most important jobs is vetting all the fan letters sent to Salinger – then still alive – who has refused to receive any since 1965. Though all of these get shredded, the disturbing case of Mark David Chapman – John Lennon’s killer, who claimed to have modelled his life on Holden Caulfield – means that Margaret’s staff make a point of reading everything first.

The film keeps Salinger coyly out of sight, though Joanna strikes up an overawed rapport with him when he calls out of the blue. One of the more precious touches here is imagining all the author’s far-flung correspondents reading their letters out to camera: it’s not a device that takes us anywhere useful. Also thrown in is a dreamlike, Astaire-and-Rogers-esque dance sequence between Joanna and her ex-boyfriend at the Waldorf Astoria, which is reaching too hard for old-timey romantic stardust.

The film’s on much firmer ground when Weaver’s on screen. The film is undisguised fan-worship, giving her the best costumes she’s had in years, but also providing a valuable opportunity to play a woman of contradictions – a prickly boss who gives Joanna grudging moments of respect one day, and then swishes her away contemptuously the next.

Weaver does a lot of finger-snapping and brisk stubbing out of cigarettes, and wants to know why valued clients (the novelist Judy Blume, for instance) get fed up of her. In one of the standout scenes, Joanna tries in the kindest way possible to say why: because such a no-nonsense sales sense leaves no space in the room for bibliophilia.

Qualley, too, following her star-making role as the hitchhiker toying with Brad Pitt in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, steps up astutely as a leading lady, doing especially well in her scenes with Booth to signal everything missing: thanks to Falardeau’s adroit framings, she never seems lonelier than when they’re together.

My New York Year is undeniably modest, relying on an autumnal sheen of good taste, and while treating its audience as adults, it certainly misses the spit and vinegar of Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Richard E Grant and Melissa McCarthy, another recent literary memoir about New York book fiends. But that 2018 film was all about the cynical grifting of an old pro; this one has open horizons instead, and a winning naïveté.

In cinemas on Friday