Slaughterhouse Five | Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman

Slaughterhouse Five | Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman | Classis movie, classic story

DVDs:

Slaughterhouse Five

	Slaughterhouse Five Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman Universal Studios, 2004 average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) has a problem with time: he keeps jumping about in his own life, principally between three key scenes. The "present" is a kind of glowing suburban bliss involving a dutiful wife, large house, and presidency of the local Lions; the "past" is being a prisoner of World War II and experiencing the firebombing of Dresden from the wrong side; the "future" takes place in a glass dome on the planet Tralfamadore, to which Billy has been mysteriously spirited along with the woman of his fantasies (Montana Wildhack, played by Valerie Perrine). It isn't meant to make too much sense, since the point is to represent a man (and a century) that has witnessed things too unbearable for a wholly sane person to make sense of. In fact author Kurt Vonnegut's anguished cry on the insanity of war is one of those completely unfilmable books, so director George Roy Hill gets points even for trying. The whole package is thought provoking in a wholly Vonnegutian way. All this, and Glenn Gould playing Bach as well. --Richard Farr

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Better than the book...

I love Kurt Vonnegut, and own nearly everything the man has written, mostly dog earned and yellowed after far too many readings. I was at first skeptical, however after viewing this film I can say that never before have I seen a piece of prose transformed into a work of like this. The cinematography is wonderful and the transitions, when Pilgrim leaps from time to time are masterful. The acting is superb, my favorite character being Paul Lazzaro; entirely quotable in every way. This film is well worth the money you spend on it, Vonnegut fans, and film fanatics alike will fall in love with it.

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Classis movie, classic story

One of my favorites since my teens. a forty year love-affair with a great movie!

So It Goes

Read Vonnegut's novel whether or not you see this film, but if you do decide to see or purchase this movie you'll be grateful you read the book first. On the other hand, if seeing the film induces you to read the novel, all the better. Count the number of times Vonnegut writes, "So it goes."

As others say here, the movie is a fairly close adaptation of the novel, without much interpretive discretion on the part of the director. There are a few alterations that don't make sense in light of Vonnegut's plot and characterization. For instance, Billy Pilgrim knows the plane he's on is about to crash. In the novel he does nothing because,in his Tralfamadorian cosmic view of things, the moment is simply "structured that way." In the film, Hill shows Billy trying to warn the pilots, which is out of character and not in keeping with the idea behind Billy's psychological and spiritual dilemma.

As excellent as this adaptation is, one thing that is painfully absent, for obvious and understandable reasons, is Vonnegut's narrative voice in the novel, which is hilarious, pugnacious, sardonic, and wistful. In the autobiographical chapters of the book Vonnegut tells us that even though he agrees that it's probably impossible to stop wars, Slaughterhouse 5 is an antiwar book. College students reading this for the first time often make the mistake of interpreting Billy Pilgrim's extreme passivity and conscious decision to adopt Tralfamadorian predestination, to strive only to focus on the happy moments to the exclusion of the awful ones, as Vonnegut's recommendation of the appropriate response to a world where bad things happen outside of the individual's control. Billy Pilgrim himself chooses immersion in adolescent fantasy over painful reality. Yet Vonnegut says explicitly in the first chapter that this is an antiwar book and that he teaches his sons that they must never take part in massacres, which is how he sees the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Free will is at the heart of Vonnegut's thesis; Billy Pilgrim doesn't believe in it, but Vonnegut does. Vonnegut tells us that the character he admires in the Old Testament is Lot's wife, who, despite God's command, looks back at the destruction God visits upon Sodom. He celebrates this small gesture of free will because of its humanity, and compares the act of writing the novel to that human act of pathos.

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Dresden POW and the Heart of Space

This movie is about the battle of the Bulge, POW life in Dresden during its firebombing, wealthy life in New England, and then eternity on a fictional planet. It is a bit Dadaesque. There are a few flashbacks and flash forwards. The tone of the film is nihilistic and irreverent, which is the style of Vonnegut's fiction. As a veteran, I liked the fact that none of the soldiers were put on a pedestal and they were far more human than stock of the trade.

Life in the Slaughterhouse

Film adaptions of novels (from Madame Bovary to Catch 22) have proved how easy failure transcends effort. However, The film version of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five proves the exception: graceful, smartly directed and beautifully acted. Rediscover a real treasure and see this film.

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