Vonnegut and Mother Night

I stumbled on this documentary about the life of Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. It was written, directed, and compiled by Bob Weide, who was bold enough to approach Vonnegut to do a film on him when he was just out of school back in 1982, and then he just kept filming a little at a time over the years until he realized they had become friends and the film might never be made. Vonnegut died in 2007, and Weide finally combed through boxes of video accumulated over 25 years, and put it all together in 2021. Weide's the guy who made Curb Your Enthusiasm and a host of other things. 

If you're a fan of Vonnegut, it's a must watch. It's a good mix of his brilliance and orneriness, and his hardships and sudden fame. Of course he was a crappy dad yelling "Shut up!" to his seven kids, playing noisily while he tried to write! But he's also the guy who adopted his sister's four boys when she died when he was still a struggling writer. There's one thing the film doesn't mention. It suggests that the sudden fame brought on by Slaughterhouse Five during the Vietnam war protests - the right book at the right time - sent him into the arms of a much younger woman after all those years of his first wife supporting him during the hard times. But elsewhere I've read that his wife had become christian after the two of them had been staunch atheists for decades, and the religious conflict had started a rift before he was swept away by fame. You'd think that would come up, but the fact that none of the kids mention it, makes me question the claim. We never really know what happened in a person's life.  

One Vonnegut book that I never got to was Mother Night. It's one of few films he makes an appearance in, and it features Nick Nolte and Sheryl Lee (who, in my mind, is forever saying "but sometimes my arms bend back") and a brief appearance by a very young Kirsten Dunst. It's an excellent, haunting movie about an American playwright caught in Germany at the start of WWII, who reluctantly agrees to be a spy. Part of his job is to broadcast the news, which he writes himself and fills with Nazi propaganda to the point of satire, like always pronouncing Roosevelt's name wrong. His scripts are carefully scrutinized, but the original text always pass inspection. They're returned with carefully placed coughs and sighs which are codes beyond his pay grade.

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After the war, he is helped back to America where he lives under a fake name until he notices that nobody knows who he is anyway. Almost nobody. The brilliance of the film is his slow realization that he did such a great job pretending to be a German propagandist that millions were killed, including, he eventually discovers, his own wife. And then he walks the same road as Raskolnikov and Meursault working through his guilt.  

The Whale and Love

 I used to write about films a lot, and then I just stopped. But for the first time in a long time, I'm compelled to say something about a film, mainly because so many reviews I read or watched seemed to get it all wrong. I have to wait for Thomas Flight (brilliant take on The Banshees of Inisherin) or Just an Observation (check out how he explains Barry) to take a stab at it.

The Whale is about the intersection of five people's lives over five days: Charlie, an online college English teacher, Liz, his friend, Ellie, his daughter, Mary, his ex-wife, and Tom, a random missionary that happened to knock on the door as Charlie was having a heart attack. It's about religion in a way that's being missed by the reviews I've read so far. 

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