Butler's Cinema Scene

Craig Roberts in "Submarine"

“SUBMARINE” My rating: C+  (Now at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

JD Salinger never allowed a movie to be made of his classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, and I now think I know why.

It’s because his adolescent protagonist Holden Caulfield — so funny, entertaining and idiosyncratic on the written page — would be borderline intolerable in the flesh-and-blood world of film.

I base this on my reaction to “Submarine,” an adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s novel about a Welsh teenager in the ‘80s. Dunthorne’s Oliver Tate is self-absorbed, judgmental and maddening in all the ways a young person can be, but while he’s fun to encounter on the written page, in the darkness of the movie house he’s an infuriating and irritating wad of mopey misery.

As played by young Craig Roberts, Oliver isn’t much fun to be around, despite the cinema tricks thrown at him by director Richard Ayoade.

For example, early on our furtively angry hero imagines what it would be like if he were to die. He envisions — and we witness — TV news reports of the mass outpouring of grief, of candle-bearing classmates, of spontaneous shrines to his memory that spring up on street corners, of platitudinous eulogies. 

And then virginal Oliver imagines himself rising from the dead to become the sexual liberator of his amazed female acquaintances.

It’s a funny segment, and we remain amused as long as Ayoade can throw such creative interpretations up on the screen. Problem is he eventually has to come back to Earth and spent some time with the real Oliver…and that’s a major drag.

The plot follows two arcs. First there’s Oliver’s desperate efforts to lose his virginity to Jordan (Yasmin Paige), a cruelly unsentimental semi-beauty.

And then there’s his jaundiced view of the marriage of his parents (played by the great Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins), and his fear that his mum is having an affair with an old friend, a pompous twit (Paddy Considine) with a Rod Stewart rooster comb and a gig staging New Age-y self-improvement seminars.

There are some amusing moments in “Submarine” (the title refers to Oliver’s assertion that he feels like he’s constantly under water) and no shortage of talent, yet the film wears out its welcome much sooner than I’d have liked.

| Robert W. Butler