There exists a certain type of
bibliophile who likes to refer to certain kinds of dense, difficult,
or structurally unique novels as “unfilmable,” with a
not-so-subtle implication that film is somehow a lesser art that
cannot hope to achieve the storytelling complexity of the more “pure”
art of literature. And as someone who holds film and literature in
equally high regard as art forms, and just sees them as fundamentally
different modes of storytelling, neither of which is inherently
superior or more capable of artistic depth than the other (except
maybe in regards to length – although the ever-shrinking
distinction between film and television as mediums has broken down
that barrier too), I have always said that there is no such thing as
an unfilmable novel. There are novels that are strongly resistant to
adaptation, that require the right filmmaker who really understands
the material at a deep level and is capable of translating it to a
very different medium without losing the essential “soul” of the
book, but there are no wholly unfilmable novels. That said, that is a very
hard thing to pull off, for the right filmmaker to become attached to
the novel, and for a studio to back that filmmaker with enough
courage to let them execute their vision without interfering, when it
often looks like better business for the studio to hedge their bets
and make a “safe” film that loses too much of the core of the
novel in the interest of marketability. And so most
resistant-to-adaptation novels that do get made into films get made
into not-particularly-good films because the stars didn't quite align
for them to be adapted in the right way, and the myth of the
unfilmable novel continues. New to blu-ray this week from Arrow Video
is 1972's Slaughterhouse-Five,
based on the iconic 1969 novel by Kurt Vonnegut; a film adaptation of
an allegedly-unfilmable novel if ever there was one, albeit one that
was made very, very quickly after the allegedly-unfilmable novel's
release. It is a film that I had never seen prior to this blu-ray,
and had always heard mixed things about, with some cinephiles holding
it in high regard, and Kurt Vonnegut himself praising it as a
“flawless translation,” while others see it as a
not-quite-successful attempt to adapt a novel that defies adaptation.
I have, however, read Slaughterhouse-Five (though
I must admit, not for fifteen years), and have always been curious to
see exactly how such a strange, postmodern, deliberately fractured
novel with such heavy (if casually presented) philosophical themes
could be adapted to the screen. Was director George Roy Hill (who
made the film right between his two best-known movies, Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and
The Sting) able to
pull it off? Arrow's disc provides the perfect chance to find out.
The
film chronicles the nonlinear life of one Billy Pilgrim (Michael
Sacks), who has the odd metaphysical condition of being unstuck in
time: rather than living his life in sequential order, his
consciousness flits back and forth between various points of his
existence at random, so he essentially lives it all at once. The film
follows his time-jumping consciousness back and forth across the
events that left the biggest mark on his psyche – his time as a
prisoner of war during World War II, when he witnessed the horrors of
the firebombing of Dresden – as well as his strange and aimless
post-war life, and a time when he is abducted by 4th
dimensional aliens and made to live in their planet's zoo. As he
lives all this out of order, often learning of pivotal events in his
life and traumas that marked him before he actually lives those
things firsthand, he is forced to confront questions of free will
versus fate or determinism, and questions of morality and cruelty
raised by his experiences in the war, all while drifting through it
like an observer, outside of time. Some of the events just mentioned
may sound like spoilers, but they're not; a peculiarity of the way in
which Vonnegut's story is told is that it repeatedly spoils itself,
and that is part of the whole point. It is at the beginning of the
film that Billy, confined to a mental hospital post-war, learns from
a doctor that his PTSD was caused by his surviving of the firebombing
of Dresden, but his World War II-era self hasn't experienced that
yet; with that future knowledge in his head but no way to stop
himself from eventually getting there (after all, it WILL happen to
him, because it did), his World War II timeline marches
fatalistically towards Dresden with a deep narrative irony. This
isn't a film about the long-term narrative, but about the moments,
and how each moment impacts Billy as it happens, and reflects and
contrasts other moments from his past or future, and how it all adds
up to a tapestry of who he is across time, even as it raises
troubling questions about whether he has any agency in any of it.
The film's
nonlinear storytelling is fascinating, intricate, and impeccably
executed. The structure easily could be unwieldy or confusing in the
hands of the wrong filmmaker, but Hill understands Vonnegut's
material and how to work with it to such a degree that the flow of
the story back and forth across time feels rather organic. The
time-jumps sometimes happen smoothly, as one scene flows directly
into another using an aural or visual motif, they sometimes happen
harshly in a way that underscores either ironies or parallels in the
scenes, and sometimes two scenes that mirror each other in unexpected
ways run simultaneously, with the audio overlapping and the visuals
rapidly cutting between past and present (or is that present and
future?). Considering what a difficult task it seems on paper to
adapt the wildly unconventional structure of this novel, the film
does it very nearly perfectly; it is a master class in how to do
nonlinear cinematic storytelling very, very well. In that regard,
Vonnegut was right: this is very nearly as flawless a translation
from page to screen as any adaptation could hope to be, for the most
part.
Of course by
necessity the film can't be quite as postmodern as the novel can; at
least, not without breaking out of its cinematic structure
altogether. The novel repeatedly references the fact that it is a
novel, and blurs the line between author and narrator as its
author's-note prologue blends straight into the story without a line
of demarcation; short of George Roy Hill being a character, the film
can't really be about the ways in which it is a film. Perhaps,
though, this is one of the strengths of Hill's adaptation: it knows
just how much of the book's audacious structure it can adapt, and it
knows what it can't, and rather than trying to go all the way at risk
of self-destructing, it does what it can do to adapt the structure
exceedingly well. And it does keep another crucial element of the
book's storytelling: the use of a highly unreliable narrator. The
first scene of the film finds Billy's kids concerned about his
well-being and his mental soundness (they clearly think he is either
mad or senile), while Billy himself sits at a typewriter writing
about how he is unstuck in time. This plants the seeds of doubt that
perhaps none of the story's fantastical elements are real; Billy
could have lived a standard, linear life, but might now be imagining
that he is living it all at once, with the plot thread on the alien
world of Tralfamadore being imagined altogether. For that matter,
there are several other places in his storyline from which he could
be imagining the whole thing, including his odd and satirical
post-war life: from a stretcher in the mental hospital as he receives
electroconvulsive therapy, for instance, or while in shock in the
ruins of Dresden. There is no way to be sure that all the moments we
are seeing are real. But they are all important moments, that get at
the core ideas of how much agency we have in our lives, and of the
good and evil of which humanity is equally capable.
The
film captures those themes faithfully and with an equal mix of satire and
gravitas. The question of whether there is room for free will in
Billy Pilgrim's existence, as he drifts through it as a passive
passenger who knows a lot about what will happen but has no ability
to influence it, is the most prominent, and is a very compelling
question indeed. And since Billy is the very textbook example of an
everyman character, average and not-that-interesting by design, the
larger question is clearly whether any of us have free will, or if we
are all just living out paths either fated or dictated by the
momentum of the universe. Then there are the themes of human morality
which stem mostly from the World War II plot thread. Billy entered
the war as an assistant to an army chaplain, ostensibly a man of God,
but is a cowardly and ineffectual figure without any real moral
convictions about the war one way or another aside from the obvious
“Nazis are bad.” His status as the token religious representative
among his band of POWs holds absolutely no weight and he holds no
influence, while the two figures who both seek to guide the group
represent the best and worst of which humanity is capable: a kind,
intelligent, nonviolent teacher-turned-soldier who came to the
military out of pure moral conscience (Eugene Roche), and a sadistic
and self-serving thug who came to the war because “the sweetest
thing in the world is revenge” (a scene-stealing Ron Leibman, who
sadly just passed away) Other characters throughout the story
likewise represent sides of humanity's morality-vs-cruelty dichotomy,
like an American who has sold out to the Nazis, or a right-wing
historian who preaches that Dresden was totally justified, and
refuses to pay attention to Billy's protests that he was there, and
knows the cost. Kurt Vonnegut was also in Dresden as a POW when it
was firebombed, and the story's portrayal of the bombing is haunting
and harrowing, showing the mark that it left on the author, and
making a strong case for it being just as horrific a war-crime as
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And thus the more
serious aspects of the book are done great justice by Hill's film.
But what it has more trouble capturing is the wry, sardonic wit of
Vonnegut's prose itself, which is where a lot of the book's sly humor
lies. As a result, the film a bit feels heavier and more
straight-faced than Vonnegut's writing; or at least, Vonnegut's
writing is funnier than the film. Despite how harrowingly the novel
conveys Vonnegut's trauma from the horrors of Dresden, in the end it
really is a satire, and often quite a funny one, in ways that the
film struggles to capture. Strikingly, the movie never uses the
book's frequent, sardonic refrain of “so it goes,” as though it
wasn't quite sure how to incorporate it. As a consequence of this,
some of the film's more over-the-top or absurd moments feel slightly
out of place, because they occupy a version of the story that doesn't
feel quite as satirical as the novel generally does. The present-day
storyline is very stilted in a way that doesn't always work, and the
film could have spent a bit more time developing the ideas of
Tralfamadore; as it is, that plotline is very important in clarifying
the story's themes, but gets more or less the bare minimum
screentime. Which on the other hand might not be an altogether bad
thing, as it presents a very kitschy brand of early-'70s sci-fi, in
contrast with the World War II scenes that still hold up as superbly
crafted.
There's
also the unfortunate fact that the film's only two female characters,
in the present-day and Tralfamadore threads, are basically broad
caricatures without a ton of depth, which could be easily seen as
casually sexist. It should be noted, though, that literally all of
the side-characters in the present-day storyline are basically broad
caricatures, lending credence to the interpretation that those plot
threads might not even be real. There are basically only three
fully-formed characters in Slaughterhouse-Five with
significant depth to them: Billy Pilgrim, and the angel and devil
characters in his band of POWs, Derby and Lazzaro. This makes a
certain amount of sense, as they are the three characters most central to
the film's themes, and as the World War II thread is the one part of
the story that is definitely real, and is the emotional backbone of
everything else. It would have made for a better film if more of the
characters, and especially the women, had been better-developed; as a
result, that and the struggles to adapt the book's more satirical
elements are the two major flaws in what is otherwise an excellent
adaptation.
In the
end, those flaws mean that I can't quite agree with Kurt Vonnegut's
assessment that the film is a flawless translation of his novel, but
it is a very, very good one, which does as great a job of adapting
such a difficult-to-film book as any movie could ever hope to.
Emphasizing the darker and heavier among the book's philosophical
themes may have been a good choice, as the World War II plotline
absolutely steals the show, with the knowledge that Billy is marching
towards a known outcome with troublingly unclear free-will with which
to stop it. While the present and outer-space threads don't work
quite as well, the construction of the whole is absolutely brilliant,
with the nonlinear storytelling handled impeccably. It is way ahead of its time in how well it
uses that type of narrative structure. I highly recommend Slaughterhouse-Five,
and I say once again, with this as further evidence: there is no such
thing as an unfilmable novel.
Score:
The
Transfer:
Arrow Video presents Slaughterhouse-Five in a brand-new 4k
restoration which they produced for this disc. It looks as fantastic
as this film possibly could: a pristine transfer free of any
noticeable defects or damage to the original camera negative, which
was the source. Detail is as great as it possibly could be, and
colors look as rich as they are supposed to – although that said,
the World War II segments of the film are deliberately very drab and
gloomy, so the colors shouldn't pop too much, and don't. The transfer
has a very filmic appearance, with pretty heavy film grain present
throughout. That said, this is a VERY grainy film indeed: the stock
on which it was shot is simply a very grainy film stock, and as a
result the details of the picture often look a bit softer than you
might expect from a 4k remaster. Arrow did a beautiful job with their
restoration; they just come up against the limits of the source
elements they are working with. As a result the disc doesn't exactly
look mind-blowing, but I can safely say that Arrow's 4k transfer is
definitive, and literally makes the film look as great as it possibly
could.
The audio is remastered in the original mono format in which it was
mixed, and the same can be said about it as the video: Arrow has done
a pristine job, and made it sound as great as it possibly could, but
they are limited by the technical limitations of what they have to
work with. It does sound great though: dialogue is very clear, sound
effects pack a punch (especially in the Dresden sequence), and Glenn
Gould's score sounds beautiful. The film may not look or sound
particularly earth-shaking, but Arrow certainly can't be faulted for
their stellar work here.
Score:
The Extras:
As
always, Arrow has produced a solid spread of extras for the disc, but
as tends to happen with older films like this, the extras lean
heavily towards critical analysis of the film, and don't feature much
input from people who actually worked on it. That's just the reality
of it: George Roy Hill and Kurt Vonnegut are both dead, Michael Sacks
retired from acting in 1984, supporting actor Eugene Roche is
likewise deceased, and since Ron Leibman just passed away days after
this blu-ray's release, it is entirely possible that he was in no
condition health-wise to participate in the extras. As such, the only
people who actually worked on the film who are included in the extras
are actor Perry King, who has a small role as Billy Pilgrim's son,
and filmmaker/producer Robert Crawford who did behind-the-scenes
documentary work on the movie. There is also an interview with the
son of executive producer Jennings Lang about the film's
distribution, but otherwise all the other extras feature film critics
and historians talking about the context of the film. Film music
historian Daniel Schweiger talks about Glenn Gould's original score
in an interview, film critic Troy Howarth provides an audio
commentary, and film critic Kim Newman provides a very interesting
and thorough video appreciation, analyzing the film and its
relationship to Vonnegut's body of work. They are all very
interesting, but focus much more heavily on analysis than
behind-the-scenes information. It is a shame that Michael Sacks did
not return to talk about the film, or co-star Valerie Perrine, but,
as the novel says, so it goes. Still, for a film that is creeping
towards 50 years old, Arrow assembled a very plentiful array of
extras which fans will really appreciate.
Score:
Slaughterhouse-Five
may
not be quite perfect, but it is an outstanding film with rich
thematic depth and a deeply compelling storytelling structure. It
rises to the challenge of Kurt Vonnegut's slippery, eccentric novel
very well indeed, and while I'm not sure I would fully agree with
Vonnegut's assessment of it being a “flawless translation,” it is
very, very close. It is without a doubt one of the best examples of a
great film adaptation of an allegedly-unfilmable novel, standing
alongside the likes of Orson Welles' The
Trial and
David Cronenberg's Naked
Lunch,
which likewise work wonders with notoriously difficult-to-adapt
books. I highly recommend it – and I highly recommend Arrow's
special edition, which was assembled with commendable love and care.
Overall
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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