The title is ironic. Have you ever seen the episode of Friends where Phoebe plays some inappropriate songs to a group of little kids? Later the kids find her at Central Perk, wide-eyed and delighted, and ready to listen, because she is the lady who tells the truth. This is the same appeal Kurt Vonnegut’s novels have had on clever teenagers for the past fifty-ish years: here is an adult who tells the truth.
But rarely has a man been more of his moment than Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five, his semi-autobiographical howl of despair based on his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden, was published right as America sent a new generation of young men into the war in Vietnam. It captured a ridiculously funny moment of nihilism, misery and despair – and space travel – that the greatest generation didn’t know how to articulate, but their children on the hippie and Ho Chi Minh trails recognised as mother’s milk.
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This biopic of the man who nailed that zeitgeist so thoroughly is more about the process of making the movie – a meta trick Vonnegut pulled off more than once in his books. Here, though, unfortunately, the trickery doesn’t quite succeed.
Co-director/writer/producer Robert B. Weide first pitched the concept of the documentary to Vonnegut in 1983. And from then until his death in 2007 they would routinely get together to work on this movie. Over the years they became friends, to the point that Weide (who also directed the movie of Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night) is mentioned in Timequake, Vonnegut’s second-to-last book. This interweaving of subject and artist is becoming more normal, since the acknowledgement that subjectivity is impossible can be appreciated when it’s combined with open and honest analysis.
But the friendship between documentarian and subject pretty clearly got in the way. Most obviously, Vonnegut’s second marriage barely rates a mention, as if it didn’t last thirty-eight years and include one child; his widow is not mentioned by name and their daughter not at all.
The movie is quite blunt about how Vonnegut celebrated the success of Slaughterhouse-Five by leaving his first wife Jane. But in leaving her for a fancy literary life in Manhattan he also left the children – the three they had together, and his sister’s four sons, who they adopted after they lost their mother to cancer and their father to a train crash.
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Weide doesn’t even try to reconcile the image of a man who preached kindness and the need for an extended family with this choice. Fortunately, all seven children, now in their sixties and seventies, have plenty to say on the subject of Vonnegut’s failings.
That should have been the interesting part. Those children talk about being frightened of Vonnegut, his black rages and capacity for cruelty, his absolute failure to contribute to any of the quotidian domestic chores, and his taking Jane’s support and hard work for granted. Is the person who treats his family like this the true self? More than the one charming roomfuls of students with funny speeches?
Instead, Weide – who was so enamoured of Vonnegut’s novels that he *taught* a class on them while he was in high school – focuses on the emotional struggles Vonnegut went through in his childhood. Which included finding his mother’s body after she committed suicide on Mother’s Day, and as he wrote his early books. But watching someone think and type just will never be cinematic, not even when Sam Waterston is providing the voiceover.
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Standard talking-head explanation are interleaved with old home movies, clips from the adaptations of Vonnegut’s works, and black-and-white cartoon re-enactments of some of the books. Daughters Edie and Nanny Vonnegut give tours of the old homestead and the decades of Weide’s footage of Vonnegut is mined in depth. But in every still photograph in which Vonnegut holds a cigarette, the smoke has been animated. Why did they feel the need to zhuzh it up? Why did they think the intensity of the feelings on display – or desperately hidden – here wasn’t enough?
It’s a shame to say that the discussion of Weide’s wife’s health problems, which seem to have been the spur for the movie’s eventual completion, are a painful sidetrack. The way in which the art is made is not necessarily as interesting as the finished product. The journey and the destination are not the same thing. If you’re going to focus on literary criticism and the emotional impact Vonnegut’s work continues to have, then you are making a critical analysis, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Any biopic that refuses to be honest as well as kind is missing the point. Would a woman author who walked out on her children at the pinnacle of her success be treated so well?
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Vonnegut’s experiences in the second world war marked him for life and his refusal to discuss it, except in his books, is something a more objective director would have pushed against. As a primer on Vonnegut’s work and life this is a good start – it shows how deeply he was loved in spite of the darkness and tragedy inside of him. But it doesn’t show how he was able to turn that pain into such magnificent alchemy on the page, and it doesn’t enable him to transcend the painful moments of his life. Weide, and his co-director Don Argott, needed to love a little less to see a little more. So it goes.
PS: Edie Vonnegut was Geraldo Rivera’s second wife. Now there’s a movie begging to be made.
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