“You want to know what I say to people when I
hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No.
What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I
say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’” What he meant, of
course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as
glaciers. I believe that, too.
This passage from Slaughterhouse-Five
is not one of Kurt Vonnegut’s more prescient moments. It’s terrifying that some
forty years after Vonnegut wrote these lines, we live in a world where warfare
is as healthy as ever, yet glaciers are terminally ill.
* * *
I’ve thought that, where available, I would supplement my readings this year with film adaptations. To my knowledge, what
film versions may exist of the Oresteia
or Prometheus Bound are hopelessly
obscure. (There is at least one film regarding Iphigenia, and perhaps
Prometheus is depicted in Clash of the
Titans or something like that? And no, the recent Ridley Scott opus, Prometheus, does not count.)
However, there was a movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five released in 1972, just three years after the
book was published. I was surprised at the mere existence of such a film.
I’ve heard some people say that this or that book is
“unfilmable,” for example, Lord of the
Rings. But why would this be so? It’s just a bunch of orcs and men fighting
each other, right? Before the age of the special-effects extravaganza, perhaps
genres like high fantasy would come off as cartoony rather than compelling.
But I’m persuaded
that it’s the more conceptually challenging books that are most difficult to turn
into films. Something like Slaughterhouse-Five,
because of its frequent time shifts and disjointed narrative, as well as potentially
staggering pitfalls like how to play violence and mental illness for comedy
(without trivializing the biting social satire), and how to portray the alien
Tralfamadorian race, is an example of a book that could turn into a disastrously
silly movie.
Indeed, in many ways, the film is laughably dumb. The
Tralfamadorians, described by Vonnegut with whimsical physical details, are
portrayed as invisible to Billy Pilgrim and his mistress, Montana Wildhack, and
even creepily prurient, with very little of the four-dimensional perspicacity they
displayed in the book. The
Paul Lazzaro character, relatively minor in the book, chews up an undeserved
preponderance of screen time, and the actor is much too tall and world-weary to
capture Vonnegut’s description of an ugly, rat-like, resentful sociopath.
And yet the movie is
not as bad as I expected. I was rarely bored, which is something of a feat for
a now forty-year-old movie that has little action. They picked the perfect dumbass-looking
actor to play Billy Pilgrim, and events and details are largely faithful to the
novel, though the tone seems off, maybe because it plays everything too
straight.
Where the book
reveals the lack of human connection among soldiers thrown together in a
sanity-deprived prison camp, the movie earnestly attempts to create
relationships among these characters. In trying to provide conventional
motivations for the key events of the story, the movie seems to betray the
book’s pervasive anxiety formed by terrors that have no clear explanation.
Movie rating: 2.5
stars out of 4 on its own merits; 3 stars in terms of its fidelity to the book
Final word: It’s a curiosity that’s worth watching if you’re
a fan of the book, but don’t expect to love it.
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