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| family home in Indianapolis |
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| Weide and Vonnegut |
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| Weide and Vonnegut |
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| Kurt, Bernard, and Allie (left to right) with parents |
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| Vonnegut as a child |
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| Allie, Bernard, and Kurt |
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| Allie and Kurt |
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| Kurt and Bernard |
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| Kurt and Jane |
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| love letter just 2 months after marriage |
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| Kurt and Jane |
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| first published article |
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| drawn decorations on door |
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| Kurt and Jane with their three children |
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| the nephews, Allie's four sons |
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| Vonnegut wall mural in Indianapolis |
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| Kurt and Bernard on a train |
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| Vonnegut with Weide |
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| Kurt Vonnegut |
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| writer/co-director Robert B. Weide |
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| Weide in room of Vonnegut drawings |
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| Weide and co-director Don Argott |
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| Vonnegut and Weide |
KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME B+ USA (127 mi) 2021 d: Robert B. Weide and Don Argott
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. —Kurt Vonnegut
Having directed and/or produced biographies of some of his favorite comedians, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce, though perhaps best known for winning an Emmy for Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO, Robert B. Weide, listed as writer, co-director, and producer, introduces this film by apologizing for appearing onscreen, basically explaining his own difficulties in taking forty years to make this film, yet it was his lifelong friendship with Vonnegut that actually sets the tone for the film. Interjecting himself into the film isn’t initially troublesome, but as it continues throughout, told from a first person perspective, almost exclusively seen through the director’s own eyes, one starts questioning the reliability of his skewed narration, particularly when he unequivocally asserts Vonnegut is the best living writer of the 20th century, something that might easily be challenged, as Toni Morrison and her Nobel prize comes to mind, 2019 Top Ten List #9 Toni Morrison: The People I Am, though certainly he is among the most unique literary voices, one of the few writers where every one of their books remains in print. And while there is a co-director, he is neither acknowledged nor recognized anywhere in the film except the credits sequence. Nonetheless, this is a labor of love, as Weide starting working on the film in 1988 with a promise to Vonnegut that he had a hard time keeping, never able to complete the film during his lifetime, released 15-years after his death, providing a definitive account of the author’s life, while also documenting his evolving friendship with Vonnegut, who sent him archival material throughout his life, including many phone calls, voicemail messages, and letters, including a treasure trove of previously unreleased footage, where the basis of their lifelong friendship actually becomes the storyline of the film, interjecting the personal with a subjective account of the novelist’s life, spending much of the time exploring the process of making this film. Heavily influenced by Vonnegut since high school, where a teacher’s recommendation to read the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions made him completely obsessed with the man, as no one was better at articulating the chaotic absurdities of the 70’s, where it became his mission to embrace Vonnegut’s vision. As a young man in his early 20’s, he reached out to him in 1982 by writing a letter expressing an interest in making a film about him, and much to his surprise Vonnegut actually responded, becoming his favorite author for life, not only his mentor but eventually a friend, spending much of their lives collecting material to make a film, but perhaps the friendship got in the way, becoming too close to the subject, where intruding cameras felt unnecessary and even disrespectful, yet it was the vehicle that held them together for the entire life of the novelist. Extremely popular by students and young people who lined up in droves at book signings, struck by his rebellious tone of subversive absurdity and anti-authoritarianism, Vonnegut was viewed by some as the voice of the 20th century, much like Mark Twain of the 19th century (Vonnegut considered him an American saint), where his anti-war message particularly resonated during the Vietnam War, along with darkly autobiographical satire that occasionally veers into science-fiction and surrealism, while cartoonish drawings help illustrate his train of thought, using humor as a means to address more serious subject matter. He was captured by the Nazi’s in Dresden along with hundreds of other American soldiers in WWII, with Vonnegut pointing out the absurdity of nations sending kids off to war, “The second world war was fought by children. The movies give the impression that war is fought by middle-aged men. It’s startling how young soldiers are,” only to be contaminated and traumatized by the gruesomeness of the experience, forever reliving the flashbacks, finding it impossible to talk about during their lifetimes. Vonnegut ended up despising war, asserting those who hated war the most were the ones who fought on the front lines. Conceiving a fractured narrative that actually involves time travel, he writes in his seminal work Slaughterhouse-Five:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He’s gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He’s seen his birth and his death many times he says. He pays random visits to all the events in between, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun.
Spending little time actually evaluating his work, this isn’t that kind of film, with Weide leaving that for others, instead it’s more an appreciation of the man himself, profoundly affected by his acerbic wit and gallows humor, his stubborn sense of injustice, and near maniacal demand for fairness, though the film clearly unveils a gloomy underside, as Vonnegut was no stranger to loneliness, chain-smoking, and a gut-wrenching alienation. Weide instead provides personal details about his unconventional life, using a combination of home movies, constructed animated sequences that resemble his signature style, writers and friends in the publishing field, voiceovers read from his novels, some by Vonnegut himself and others by Sam Waterston, interviews with his three children Nanette, Edith, and Mark, and four nephews, also various biographers (Jerome Klinkowitz, Gregory Sumner, Ginger Strand and Rodney Allen), with frequent interjections by the director himself, creating a portrait of the man from early childhood, providing a glimpse of where it began, what happened in between, and where it ended. Vonnegut grew up in one of the wealthiest families in Indianapolis, Indiana, that, to a large extent, helped build the city, with architects, a brewery, and a successful hardware store, but they lost their family fortune during the Great Depression, taking a toll on his parents, particularly their mother, who suffered from depression, eventually taking her own life, forcing them to move out of their stately home built by his architect father just for them, where the family handprints embedded into cement still remain. The youngest of three children, Vonnegut claimed the youngest always has to resort to humor in order to get attention, growing particularly close to his older sister Allie, five years older, who provided the affection and emotional nourishment missing from his mother, going everywhere together, as she always looked after him. Jumping back and forth in time, paying homage to his most famous literary work, the film plays out like a fractured memory with no conventional structure, feeling more abstract, yet it is massively researched, making his life difficult to film, as according to Vonnegut, “anything that is any good of mine is on a printed page.” Weide is the perfect vehicle to channel Vonnegut’s life and cultural significance, as his affection for the man is felt in every frame of the film, feeling more like a heartfelt tribute to his life, a living testimonial to the kind of man and artist he would become, combining social criticism, black humor, and a call to basic human decency. Success did not come easy, forced to take a job provided by his world-renowned atmospheric physicist brother Bernard (eight years older) doing corporate public relations work in the research division for General Electric, where he was privy to the latest scientific developments, some of which managed to reappear in Cat’s Cradle. Becoming less enamored with science, growing more and more disgusted by the inhumanity of its effects, they moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts to become a full-time writer, where he started writing short stories, greatly encouraged by his wife Jane, who remained one of his biggest lifelong supporters, writing personalized letters back to publishing houses from the piles of rejection notices he received indicating why they were wrong, leading to his first published story, Report On the Barnhouse Effect, appearing in Collier’s magazine in 1950. He quickly discovered that writing short stories was much more lucrative financially than writing novels, which can take a year or more to write, developing an unadorned writing style that he could churn out at a faster rate. Short stories were the television of the era, delivered by mail to American households on a regular basis through magazines, also available at libraries, though it was television that eventually drove the short story market into oblivion. Nonetheless, he wrote his first novel, Player Piano, which was published in 1952. Vonnegut wrote briefly for Sports Illustrated, fired after a single article, and even managed a Saab dealership in Massachusetts, the first in the country, but used the building primarily as an office, having little interest in selling cars. More than anything, what this film reveals is that time spent with this man, as Weide does, is invaluable, like a preserved time capsule.
Eschewing anything resembling objectivity, bordering at times on self-indulgence (Vonnegut was himself self-indulgent), their lives merged and intersected through an increasingly close 25-year friendship, often seen chatting together, eventually taking center stage in the film, “He thinks what I think about the world,” gaining a unique vantage point of intimacy. Given full access to the life of an iconic figure, this is mostly a love fest with rare moments of poignancy that can be extremely moving, eliciting genuine warmth, though it does include the artist in his best and worst moments. Just a month after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he married Jane Marie Cox in a Quaker ceremony on the backyard terrace of Jane’s house in Indianapolis, with Allie as the maid of honor, honeymooning at French Lick Resort on the edge of the Hoosier National Forest, with Jane making him read her favorite novel The Brothers Karamazov on their honeymoon. A decade later, he lost his sister prematurely to cancer, viewed as his guardian angel, contending Allie was the one person he always wrote for, becoming his exclusive target audience, adding her four children to his own, as her husband also died in a tragic railway bridge accident just days before her death. These kids describe the seemingly unlimited joy and freedom they had wreaking havoc, like a marauding gang of hellraisers, pretty much left alone, turning Vonnegut’s life into chaos, subject to drastic mood swings, a grumpy and inattentive father, belligerently yelling at them to shut up when he was working, making everyone afraid of him, yet also growing elated after a successful day of writing, showing a relaxed and more playful side. He ascended to overnight celebrity status with the massive success of Slaughterhouse-Five, a book that he painstakingly worked on following his war experiences, described as his Dresden novel, taking nearly 25-years to write, initially thinking it would be easy recounting what he saw, instead writing draft after draft until he finally got it right, where the money that had previously eluded him all his life suddenly poured in by the bucketloads. Unfortunately, even for a Midwesterner like Vonnegut, success can go to one’s head, breaking up with his long-supportive wife Jane as he moved from his Cape Cod residence to New York, leaving her for Jill Krementz, nearly twenty years younger, a photojournalist who spent a year working in Vietnam, meeting while working on a photographic series about writers in the early 1970’s, eventually publishing 31 books of her own. For such a quirky and inventive writer who challenges the norms, this couldn’t be more typical male chauvinist behavior in a midlife crisis, hoping for salvation by discarding the old and finding something new. His kids, of course, were devastated, mostly feeling cruelly abandoned, having no words to describe what this did to their mother, who once thought she’d be a writer too, quickly recognizing her husband’s tremendous talent even before he did, sacrificing her own dreams and ambitions in order to help him (How Jane Vonnegut Made Kurt Vonnegut a Writer), making their divorce all the more heartbreaking. Vonnegut had a difficult time living up to expectations after having such considerable success, as writing a follow-up work was a painful struggle, splitting his time between numerous anti-war rallies, college commencement addresses around the country, and also teaching a Harvard University course on creative writing. While his personal life was disintegrating, facing his own issues with depression, critics lambasted his next novel with a scathing rebuke, unleashing a wave of criticism they may have held in reserve for years, claiming it lacked substance, exhibited a lack of fully realized female characters, with no racial diversity whatsoever. In much of his work Vonnegut’s own voice is apparent, yet occasionally it is filtered through the literary alter-ego of a recurring character, science-fiction author Kilgore Trout (based on science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon), characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism about the human condition. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works before he died at the age of 84 from brain injuries in 2007, a result of falling and hitting his head. Often derided and overlooked in intellectual circles and print reviews, as humor is never taken seriously, yet Vonnegut was able to incorporate it in unique ways, offering a sly commentary on the times we’re living in, conjuring up characters and places from his imagination that felt strangely different, where the irreverence of his breezy style recalled J. D. Salinger from the 50’s, writers that served in the war, deeply affected by the experience, but distinguished themselves afterwards by appealing to the alienation of youth with edgy, offbeat humor and biting sarcasm that set them apart by making literature fun to read, offering a kind of iconoclastic wisdom.
