Sometimes I wish I'd never heard of Holden Caufield, the teen hero of J.D. Salinger's seminal novel,
The Catcher in the Rye. *** Had I never read Salinger or seen movies such as
Rushmore, I might have thought more highly of director
Richard Ayoade's
Submarine, the story of 15-year-old Oliver Tate (
Craig Roberts), the Welsh narrator of a story about (what else?) himself.
*** Ayoade tries for (and sometimes succeeds at) giving his movie visual flair, but his strenuous commitment to quirkiness wore me out.
*** Oliver, who seems to be growing up in the 1970s, is baffled by his parents, a depressed biologist father (
Noah Taylor) and a frustrated mother (
Sally Hawkins) who flirts with an old beau, a proto-New Ager played by
Paddy Considine).
*** Oliver also becomes involved with Jordana Bevan (
Yasmin Paige), a classmate with a taste for arson.
*** The story leads Oliver to a defining test: Can he drop his cynical pose and be available when Jordana needs more than another deadpan playmate?
*** Ayoade's visual acrobatics didn't totally freshen this teen-age story for me. I kept thinking that Oliver should get back to us in maybe 10 or 15 years. Maybe then I'd be interested. Or maybe not.
