Has there ever been a really good movie adapting a Vonnegut novel? The three that I’ve seen (Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five and Happy Birthday Wanda June) were pretty defective, but there was a really good TV play based on “Who Am I This Time?” a few years back.
Mother Night is a great movie.
I was a little bit leery of it, since I despise Nick Nolte, but he did a good job as Howard W. Campbell Jr., and I think the antipathy he naturally inspires worked well for the role.
The rest of the cast is top-notch, too – John Goodman as the Blue Fairy Godmother, Sheryl Lee/Kirsten Dunst as Resi, and Alan Arkin as Kraft.
The screenplay is as faithful an adaptation of a novel as one could hope for.
**Don’t forget Between Time and Timbuktu. Not great, but interesting. I heard that the adaptation of “Slapstick” (Slapstick of Another Kind), starring Jerry Lewis (!) was awful. Don’t look to Jerry Lewis for faithful adaptations – just look at what he did to Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet.
I’m not a great Vonnegut fan, I have to admit. Check he IMDB for any other adaptations.
I liked the adaptation of his short story Harrison Bergeron.
I understand that the reason it was called “Slapstick of Another Kind” was because Vonnegut himself was so horrified by what they had done to his story that he made them change the name.
And he was right. I saw it on TV once and it was completely over the top. It starred Jerry lewis and Madeline Khan as the twins with Marty Feldman as their doctor. But the story itself is outlandish enough that adding outlandish people to play in it just made it so overdone it was almost unwatchable.
I thought that Breakfast Of Champions was pretty much as good as possible. A lot of the book is unfimlable since it’s mostly inner monologue and exposition. I thought Bruce Willis did a good job as Dwayne Hoover.
I agree that Mother Night is not only the best Vonnegut adaptation, but a fine film in its own right. Vonnegut must have liked it-- he had a cameo. It also helps that it was one of my favorite KV novels (not the top, but pretty damn good).
Slaughterhouse Five was also a pretty good adaptation.
I thought that Slaughterhouse Five was excellent, and I hate 99/100 movies!
Slaughterhouse 5 is an excellent movie – but I can see why Krokodil may consider it flawed as an adaptation – George Roy Hill brought a lot to it that is his alone, and imparted a flavour to it that is quite distinct from the novel. It’s far more grotesque in its character than anything Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Hill worked a similar trick with The World According to Garp. A great movie when considered on its own merits, but altogether removed from John Irving’s Garp.
Breakfast of Champions was perfectly cast–I actually pictured Nick Nolte in that role as I was reading it. Overall, it was well done–and yet almost completely unwatchable. The book is just unfilmable.
I barely remember seeing Mother Night, but I thought it was excellent at the time.
Good movie, but not a good one to watch on Christmas day all alone.
It’s enough to make one just not wanna be anymore.
Damn, that was depressing.