Holden on: `Tadpole' & `Igby Goes Down' - Screen

Recently I heard a private-school English teacher discuss her ninth-graders' surprising hostility to The Catcher in the Rye. They rejected Holden Caulfield's stubborn insistence on purity, his fatalistic view of adulthood as a dead-end into phoniness, cruelty, or the corruption of success. "I swear to God," Holden says at one point in the novel, "if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me." Such sentiments find little purchase among young people whose main take on their parents' success is anxiety about not attaining it themselves. Holden is smart, they complain, so why is he such a loser?

Perhaps a backlash against this attitude explains the current cinematic resurgence of the Salingeresque. Last year saw Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenebaums, an archly comic study of an eccentric, dysfunctional New York family that resembled J. D. Salinger's Glass family. Then came Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a morose dropout and wannabe writer who calls himself Holden. Now two other films, Tadpole and Igby Goes Down, have taken up the story of prep precociousness adrift in Manhattan.

Tadpole is the less Salingeresque of the pair, partly because Oscar (Aaron Stanford) is a kid Holden might have hated. The intellectually precocious son of a divorced and remarried Columbia professor (John Ritter), Oscar orders in restaurants in fluent French and reads Voltaire on the train. He sees himself as an adult; he's the kind of kid who charms his father's friends but condescends to girls his own age. "God," sniffs one of them, sounding Holdenesque herself, "you're like a forty-year-old dropped into a fifteen-year-old's body!"

Director Gary Winik exerts a light comic touch, labeling scenes from Oscar's Thanksgiving visit home from boarding school with blackboarded aphorisms from Voltaire, such as "It is not enough to conquer; one must know how to seduce." Which introduces the movie's plot, because what's most French about Oscar, it turns out, is that he's in love with his stepmother, Eve, a medical research scientist (Sigourney Weaver). Oscar adores Eve, gazing in rapture at her hands, at her red scarf; he brings her a sandwich in her lab, and when she explains her work on the depolarization of cardiac myocytes, he sighs and exclaims, "such beautiful words." Unbearably smitten, Oscar flees his father's Thanksgiving party to drown his sorrows in a midtown bar. Hours later, his stepmother's best friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth, of TV's Cheers), runs into him as she returns from the party, and brings him back to her apartment to sober up. When he lies down with a groan on her massage table--she's a chiropractor--she offers him a shoulder rub. Fatal move, it turns out, because Diane is wearing Eve's red scarf, which Oscar sees, dangling enticingly, from his perch on the massage table. ... Ah, l'amour!

In the romantic contretemps that ensues, Diane gushes lasciviously at lunch to her circle of middle-aged girlfriends, who clamor for Oscar's phone number. Neuwirth is delicious as the coolly sexual Mrs. Robinson figure, especially in one hilarious scene in which she dines out with Oscar's father, Eve, and Oscar himself; he's terrified she'll reveal their affair, while she plays a mischievous footsie with him under the table. Tadpole is breezily unconcerned about offending sensitivities in our age of worry over adult-child seduction. It turns scandal into repartee. "That's 15-40, right?" Oscar calls out on the tennis court to Eve, who by now has discovered the truth. "A ratio you seem particularly fond of," she shoots back.

Tadpole--the title refers to a childhood nickname Oscar has outgrown--is a slight thing, as sparkly and warm as Oscar's fantasies of himself with Eve, all champagne and carriage rides in Central Park played to French chansons. Beneath the movie's mildly scandalous events lie the deep harmonies and reassurances of a classic coming-of-age narrative. Passions disturb and then yield; out of hurt comes perspective, and we are no longer quite who we were. Director Winik keeps this scheme very neat, right down to tying things up with the David Bowie tune, "Changes." With its cheerful Oedipal complications, and the winking amorality of its sexual initiations, Tadpole owes less to Salinger than to Louis Malle; it's less Catcher in the Rye than Murmur of the Heart.

Colder by far is Burr Steers's comedy, Igby Goes Down. Played to perfection by Kieran Culkin, Igby Slocumb sports the rude-prep outfit of school jacket with necktie askew, and angel face twisted in pure insolence. He's a serial dropout, a kid so obnoxious his own shrink slaps him across the face in fury. The film's acid humor bubbles in the gap between the cheery sitcom music and what we're seeing onscreen: Igby, prodded by his neurotic, wealthy mother Mimi (Susan Sarandon) to take his daily cocktail of therapy drugs, tosses the pills at her across the table--whereupon she takes one! Family life alternates cold contempt with the occasional fit of hysterical narcissism. Sarandon, informed that Igby has flunked out of yet another school, hisses at him: "Did you ever--for a second--think about how this reflects on me?"

Igby's other nemeses are his older brother, a Columbia grad geared to cynical success, and his Nietzschean businessman godfather, played by Jeff Goldblum, who spouts casually Darwinian observations: "I believe certain people in life are meant to fall by the wayside, to serve as signposts for the rest of us." There's ample scope for Holdenesque hypocrisy-piercing, and Igby wields a razor sarcasm. "If heaven is such a wonderful place," he challenges the school rector, "then how is getting crucified such a big fucking sacrifice?" Things have gotten rougher since 1951, when Catcher in the Rye was published; Igby lets fly where Holden would have mused inwardly. "You call your mother Mimi?" Igby's new girlfriend asks him. "Medea was already taken," he fires back.

With such scathing one-liners Steers gives his film a hard carapace of irony. We keep waiting for him to take us beneath, to where Igby's sneering sarcasm melts in pain and anguish. The anguish turns out to be Igby's schizophrenic father (Bill Pullman), confined for years in an institution. Flashbacks feature a harrowing scene in which he falls apart in the bathroom, screaming and beating his head, as six-year-old Igby watches in horror. Fear of madness is Igby's deep, secret dread; that when he goes down, he will fall and fall--as Holden's teacher, Mr. Antolini, warned him he might--and never stop.

When the fall comes, it lands him as a drug delivery boy, servicing hopeless rich girls so spoiled they pay with traveler's checks and francs--updated versions of Holden's prep monsters. But Igby's misery lacks a sympathy-winning note of self-punishment. Holden--like his precursor Huck Finn--retained the conventional morality of his parents and their world, and saw himself as a failure, a screw-up. That's partly because in 1951, family pathology stayed hidden from view; we don't know much of anything about Holden's parents, just that his father is a corporate lawyer who makes a lot of money, and his mother is "very nervous." Half a century later, it's all out in plain view: Igby Goes Down is The Catcher in the Rye with the spaces filled in, extrapolated forward through a half-century of family entropy, youth rebellion, drugs, adolescent sex, and copious use of the F-word.

If the story loses something by virtue of its explicitness, I'm not sure you can blame Steers. In any case, his film's determined bleakness seems true to the spirit of Salinger. Like the novel, and in opposition to Tadpole, Igby offers an anti-coming-of-age narrative. The abiding pessimism of the antinarrative defies our faith in the orderly unfolding of experience and in pain ultimately redeemed as growth. Whether Holden's refusal to grow up is heroic or pathological--whether it is corruption he's resisting, or simply life--makes for the enduring interest of Salinger's novel. That we start in childhood from a spotless purity later stained by life's corruption is the Rousseauian notion Igby's antinarrative poses against the playful Voltairean confidence of Tadpole. The self-tortured by experience versus the self-nurtured by experience: your choice between these two films depends on whether you prefer to be alarmed, or charmed.

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