a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (’69), the film directed by George Roy Hill (’72), and the graphic novel adaptation by Ryan North and Albert Monteys (’20)
by dan raphael
2: The Movie
The Slaughterhouse Five movie starts with Billy Pilgrim, older, at a typewriter. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” he types, and then the shifting starts, sometimes with a voice of another character taking us from one scene/time to another.
From an oldish Billy at the typewriter we go to WWII, to Billy’s life and family in Illium, NY. The war part proceeds chronologically—basically the same story line as the novel but expanded a bit—while the other timelines, including life in a dome on Tralfamadore, jump around a bit.
Some of my inability to engage with this film is Billy Pilgrim as played by Michael Sacks. WWII Billy is so wide-eyed and naïve, too much of a tabula rasa, for me to empathize with. Mid-life Billy also stays blank-faced, rolling with fate and his material success. This was a deliberate choice, Billy as Everyman or the eternal innocent, but I need a little more to hold on to. Also the blankness of Billy gives a little more credence to his family’s worry that his tales of another life on a distant planet are hallucinatory madness. (In ’69, when this book came out, PTSD was only beginning to reach public consciousness.)
Add in the over-the-top performance of Billy’s wife, the satire of middle-class existence, and the spoofing of war movie cliches and science fiction, and the impact of a horror like Dresden is a bit diluted. Amid the post-bombing rubble we can feel for the destruction and dead bodies, but the engagement took too long in coming.
Director George Roy Hill made Slaughterhouse Five between Burtch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, so it had some Hollywood cred, though not much star power cast-wise (Ron Liebman and Valerie Perrine are the two names.) Craft-wise, it’s a well-made film.
Does the failure of this film to work for me mean the novel is unfilmable? The screenwriter and director stayed pretty close to the novel, adding cinematic attention-getting devices like more frequent time-cuts and exaggerated characters. Does the film stay too faithful to the book, instead of adding some film-appropriate vision of its own? There’s so much linguistic and literary in the book that its strength lies more in the telling than in what happens. Books and movies “tell” in different ways. Do original screenplays—as opposed to adaptations—bring more creative energy to a film?
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