Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

The documentarian Robert B. Weide pays tribute to his friend Kurt Vonnegut with an over-extended but welcome and intimate profile.

Robert B. Weide, the main man behind this film (he is credited as writer, co-director and producer) is best known for his TV work but in 1982, at the age of twenty-three, he met the author Kurt Vonnegut, then fifty-nine, for the first time. They would go on to become friends and that remained so right up to Vonnegut's death in 2007. Furthermore, Weide interviewed him several times in his later years and that was done in anticipation of a film being made about him. However, the huge success of the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm which became central to Weide’s life for more than twenty years contributed to this film biography being left in abeyance until now.

The friendship between the two men inevitably makes this documentary a very personal film and ahead of viewing it I had heard that some critics felt that it had become personal in an unrewarding way by including so much footage about Weide himself and his family. But for much of the time I thought that the personal connection was wholly beneficial to the film. Their rapport contributes to the interview footage which reveals what an engaging personality Vonnegut had and it may well have helped too in enabling Weide to obtain archive material and home movie footage. Certainly Weide incorporates himself into the film but, although aware that he was being self-indulgent in doing so, my initial response was that it was not enough to matter.

I should mention that I approached the film as somebody with a very limited knowledge of Vonnegut and without having read any of his novels – not even Slaughterhouse-Five which, later filmed, appeared in 1969 and made its mark on a generation in much the same way that Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye had done some eighteen years earlier. Aided by contributions from members of Vonnegut's family including his children as well as by insights from friends, members of the literary world and other writers (most notably John Irving who was a student of Vonnegut’s), the film did what I wanted it to do very well in that I found it informative about both the life and the writing. The individuality of Vonnegut’s style and the particular appeal of his work is well brought out. Another point made effectively is the lucky benefit of the timing when Vonnegut, at last able to confront and build on his own experiences as a wartime prisoner of the Germans who survived the destruction of Dresden in 1945, published Slaughterhouse-Five at a time when the Vietnam conflict made his own horror of war’s brutality chime with America's biggest issue of the day.

It is good too that, despite Weide's intense admiration for Vonnegut, he readily acknowledges that some of the novels, including many of the later ones, were misfires. In much the same way, while the good side of Vonnegut’s character comes across (not least the way in which he looked after his sister’s four children when she and her husband both died tragically), the film is also ready to acknowledge his failings. In part this involves a recognition of how an artist driven by commitment to his art is likely to neglect his family. This becomes apparent in the film well before its chronological progression brings it to the point when Vonnegut, while still married to Jane Cox whose encouragement of his writing had been crucial, took up with Jill Krementz who would become his second wife.

But, if three-quarters of this film works very effectively, the last quarter does not. Despite the amount of ground it has to cover, one’s suspicion that a running time of over two hours is excessive proves all too well-founded. It is not uncommon in documentary biopics to find the filmmaker reluctant to bring things to a close and, right down to the extra images within the end credits, Weide fails to realise that drawn-out endings are rarely a good idea. But it is worse than that since in its later stages Weide includes footage about himself and his wife Linda (the film’s dedicatee) that is entirely out of keeping. Even though Vonnegut died in 2007 Weide can't resist incorporating references to his own life since then and to his wife's recent health problems. One can't escape the notion that in this film Weide is foolishly trying to emulate closely what his subject had done (I say that because we are told that Vonnegut’s late work Timequake was actually concerned with his trouble in writing it and that much earlier the author had already made himself a character in his work). Indeed, the last stages of this film are misjudged to the extent that one grows exasperated with it, but until then Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is decidedly worthwhile, an informative biopic that gains much from the author’s personal contributions.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Featuring  Robert B. Weide, Edie Vonnegut, Nanny Vonnegut, Mark Vonnegut, Jerome Klinkowitz, Sidney Offit, Daniel Simon, Daniel L. Ulin, Morley Safer, Linda Weide, Dan Wakefield, John Irving, Sam Waterston.

Dir Robert B.Weide and Don Argott, Pro Robert B. Weide, Screenplay Robert B. Weide, Ph David Yosha, Don Argott and others, Ed William Neal, Bo Price and Demian Fenton, Music Alex Mansour and Paul Cantelon.

9.14 Pictures/Whyaduck Productions-Altitude Film Entertainment.
127 mins. USA. 2021. US Rel: 19 November 2021. UK Rel: 22 July 2022. Cert. 15.