Directors – Don Argott & Robert B. Weide, Screenplay/Producer – Robert B. Weide, Music – Paul Cantelon & Alex Mansour, Animation – Vince Gorman. Production Company – Whyaduck Productions/9.14 Pictures.
Cast
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Jim Adams, Kurt Adams, Steve Adams, William Rodney Allen, Joel Bleifus, John Irving, Jerome Klinkowitz, Peter Nice, Sidney Offitt, Morley Safer, Dan Simon, Ginger Strand, Gregory Summer, David Ulin, Bernard Vonnegut, Edie Vonnegut, Mark Vonnegut, Nanny Vonnegut, Dan Wakefield
Sam Waterston (Voiceover)
Kurt Vonnegut (1922- 2007) is considered one of the great literary writers. Vonnegut produced such books as Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Breakfast of Champions (1973), among others. Much of Vonnegut’s work also rests inside the SF genre, a labelling he disdained – he has received both the Hugo Awards and prestigious mainstream awards such as the Mark Twain Award and the National Book Award – and taps a vein concerned with the absurdity of human existence. A good part of Vonnegut’s work also lies in science-fiction. (A list of films adapted from Vonnegut’s works is at the bottom of the page).
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is a Documentary about Vonnegut made by Robert Weide. It was a documentary that Weide shot over the course of 35 years. When he started out, Wiede had directed a documentary The Great Standups (1984) and then gained some standing after he helped Larry David launch tv’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000- ), directing the pilot and many of the episodes. Wiede also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Vonnegut’s Mother Night (1996) and directed the dramatic film How to Win Friends & Alienate People (2008).
Unstuck in Time becomes an unusual example of author insertion in a documentary. Robert Weide stops the straight biographical narrative to tell how he became a Vonnegut fan in high school and then wrote to Vonnegut proposing the documentary, which he began shooting way back in 1984. This was something that absorbed Weide’s time for the next three decades. It was an occasion during which Weide and Vonnegut became close friends. We get to see scenes where Vonnegut was suggesting that Weide marry his girlfriend, of how Weide put on a production of Vonnegut’s play Happy Birthday Wanda June (1971) to bring Vonnegut to the West Coast in 2001 and of how Vonnegut would send videotapes of all his lectures to Weide to create some type of archive, even included mention of Weide as a character inside his last novel Timequake (1997).
Writer Kurt Vonnegut
Despite the title Unstuck in Time and its clear reference to Slaughterhouse Five, the documentary takes a fairly linear journey through Vonnegut’s life. It starts with his childhood, where surprisingly Vonnegut’s brother had been able to unearth a trove of family film footage of them as children. Vonnegut speaks of growing up in Indianapolis with a distant father who was an architect who ended up being ruined by The Depression and a depressed mother who committed suicide in 1944, and of his attachment to his sister Alice. Vonnegut takes us on a tour of his old school and even takes Weide and his camera along to his sixtieth high school reunion.
Not long after school, Vonnegut entered the US Army during World War II but was captured at Ardennes. One of the central events of his life was experiencing the firebombing of Dresden where he and fellow soldiers had been placed in an old slaughterhouse and emerged safely to find the city devastated after which they were conscripted into helping dispose of German bodies. Vonnegut is dismissive of the influence of Dresden, saying at one point that dogs in his childhood has more influence over him. Nevertheless, it is the central event of his life and the basis of his magnum opus Slaughterhouse-Five. At one point, Weide shows us multiple copies of the manuscript for the book and Vonnegut’s abortive attempts at starting it with different characters names and titles, showing how Vonnegut struggled to get the story out. It also ends up being the work that the documentary spends more time discussing than any other of Vonnegut’s books.
Following the war, Vonnegut became a publicist for General Electric, the experiences of which formed the basis of his book Cat’s Cradle, before finding success as a successful short story writer. With the rise of television, the short story market dropped off and Vonnegut began turning to write novels full time, before finding eventual acclaim and a cult following with Slaughterhouse-Five. In between this, he and his children talk of married life in Cape Cod and of Vonnegut adopting his sister’s children after the death of she and her husband.
(l to r) Kurt Vonnegut and documentary-maker Robert B. Weide
The documentary is unafraid to depict Vonnegut in an unglamorous light, showing how he left his wife and abandoned the children for another woman after finding fame, or his children talking about his lack of interest in doing the whole parenting thing. Weide spends some time on how Vonnegut was stuck after the success of Slaughterhouse-Five and the question of what to follow it up with, resulting in a number of works through the 1970s and 80s that met with a critical thumbs down and a dismissal of his work. And that is before we come through Vonnegut’s later years and death. The result in its thirty plus year perspective feels one of the most complete works about an individual and their life put to film.
