Slaughterhouse Five (1972)*** out of **** September 4, 2001 BY ADAM KEMPENAAR "Every deeply felt novel which has been turned into a movie has, as a movie, seemed one character short to me. It has made me uneasy on that account," Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1972. That same year, Universal Pictures released George Roy Hill's film adaptation of Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut's classic novel about an everyman named Billy Pilgrim who "has come unstuck in time." Ironically, Vonnegut was a huge fan of the film, calling it a "flawless translation of my novel to the silver screen," despite the fact that the narrative develops around its unique temporal structure, rather than through character development. Similar to the recent noir twist, Memento, which unfolded in reverse chronological order to underscore the main character's predicament, Hill uses the flashback here to illustrate Billy's (Michael Sacks) detachment from the world. In fact, only a few minutes of the movie actually occur in the "present," with most scenes rolling seamlessly from one time and place from Billy's past to another -- as a child, as a prisoner of war during the bombing of Dresden in World War II, or as a successful optometrist in Ilium, New York, after the war. And even when he is in the present, Billy isn't really there. He is a man who is acted upon more than one who acts. Curiously, both the movie and the book have been described as anti-war, although neither version seems to be as concerned with the horrors of battle as it is with the disillusionment that follows when the war is over. How do you manage life in upstate New York, with your white-picket fence and nagging wife and kids (and dog named Spot!), after you've had to remove masses of burned bodies amid the rubble of a once-glorious city? Or watched your only friend be executed for pocketing a small, beautiful statue that had somehow survived the bombing unharmed? Billy's answer is to escape into a fantasy world where the past, present, and future are blurred into one. "I drool and cackle every time I watch [Slaughterhouse 5] because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book," Vonnegut explained in 1972. With its obsessive visual associations and challenging structure, Hill's adaptation isn't the most accessible or entertaining movie ever to be made from a great novel. It is, however, one of the few that matches the original's ambition. Agree? Disagree? E-mail CinemaScoped at: cinemascoped@sbcglobal.net |
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