Phonies! Movies Inspired by J.D. Salinger
The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001
Anderson's tale of a trio of former child prodigies and
their disappointing adult lives borrows pretty blatantly from Salinger's
tales of the Glass family, a septet of former child radio-quiz-show stars
who unsuccessfully transition into ... disappointing adult lives. While Holden
Caulfield is rightfully Salinger's most memorable creation, the author spent
much of his productive years writing about the Glasses in books such as
Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Seymour: An Introduction.
More than just a quirky family, as TIME critic Richard Lacayo writes, "It's customary to assume that the seven Glass children ... make up a kind of group portrait of Salinger, each of them a reflection of his different dimensions: the writer and the actor, the searcher and the researcher, the spiritual adept and the pratfalling schmuck. That may very well be true. He made sure we could never be sure."