Another movie I’ve been intending to write about and haven’t gotten to yet is Slaughterhouse-Five. This is another one directed by George Roy Hill. I think I watched this right around the same time as The Sting (maybe even the same day), but I wanted to wait and ponder the movie a bit before writing about it, and then I went out of town and was dealing with other life issues, and suddenly a few weeks had passed and I still hadn’t written about it.
I’m a bit reluctant to frame my thoughts of Slaughterhouse-Five in the old “book vs. movie” frame. That’s such a tired discussion, but it’s sometimes inevitable. I agree with the idea that the book is nearly always better than the movie. There a few instances where the movie is so incredibly good, it’s close to being a match for the book but still falls short (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Remains of the Day, for instance). There are a few where the movie actually surpasses the book (The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and maybe The Silence of the Lambs). But usually, that cliché that “the book is better” is true. I remember how disappointed I was when I watched the movie Atonement. I loved the book so much that I knew the movie wouldn’t equal it, and even though I feel fairly certain the movie was actually fine, I couldn’t help comparing the two and feeling incredibly let down.
When I found out that Slaughterhouse-Five had been made into a movie, I was surprised. I read the book a few years ago and loved it, but it struck me as the kind of book that would be nearly impossible to adapt into a movie. So I was curious and a bit reluctant to watch the movie. And, to my surprise, the movie struck me as a good adaptation.
The book centers on a character who is “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels back and forth throughout his life. One moment he is twenty, the next he is fifty. He doesn’t have any control over where he goes or when. He just slips around. This, of course, leads to all sorts of questions about free will, one’s ability to control the path of one’s own life. Billy Pilgrim has no real choice about how his life will unfold, even as he’s living it. He is merely a spectator observing his life as it happens to him. This structure of moving back and forth through time and space, and having a lack of grounding does not strike me as ideally suited for a movie, but it actually worked reasonably well. There is a certain amount of confusion trying to piece together how everything fits together, but the movie unfolds for an audience much like life itself unfolds for Billy Pilgrim: scenes out of sequence but with an inevitability to them.
One major difference between the book and the movie is that I don’t remember feeling a sense of ambiguity from the book about whether Billy Pilgrim was genuinely “unstuck in time” or whether he was suffering some delusions; but in the movie, I think one could reasonably argue that toward the end of his life, Billy has become mentally unstable and is simply suffering hallucinations and confusing memory with the present. The thing that works best for the movie, however, to tip the balance toward the view that Billy is actually suffering from some time travel phenomenon rather than mental illness is the performance of the lead actor, Michael Sacks. He plays the character throughout at every age, and although the character grows older, there is a constant innocence to Billy, a naiveté that shines through. It becomes easy to believe that he accepts his fate, that he understands he has no control over the passage of time around him, of where and when he’ll be next. Sometimes, he struggles with it, but ultimately, he seems to accept his lot and move forward and backward passively. That passivity is tough to keep engaging, but it works. Had Sacks tackled the role with more dynamism, the film might have failed. It strikes me as a performance that is perfect in its simplicity, but would be easy to ignore or dismiss. I looked up information on Michael Sacks after watching the film and was disappointed to discover that he made few movies and retired from acting nearly twenty years ago. I wonder if his performance was dismissed as too simple and not engaging and this lead role in a significant film actually scuttled his career rather than launching it. If so, that’s a shame because he is just right for this role.
There is another difference that stood out to me as well. One thing I particularly like about the book is the metafictional aspect of it. It begins with a discussion by the narrator, seemingly the author Kurt Vonnegut, about how he has wanted to write this book for a long time and has struggled. This sense of reality outside the book adds an extra layer to it, a recognition that the fiction is fiction, but a sense that there is a larger purpose being explored through fiction. Without that frame, the movie feels somewhat lacking in comparison.
One additional element that stands out to me about the movie is the occasional lapse in point-of-view. We follow Billy Pilgrim throughout his life, through World War II, through married life afterward, all the way to a distant planet when he is abducted by aliens, and even to the moment of his death. The story demands a close point-of-view limited to that character’s experience, yet that isn’t what the movie gives us. The movie begins with Billy’s daughter and son-in-law, and there is an extended comic sequence late in the movie that follows Billy’s wife. These shifts away from Billy’s consciousness feel out of place and become distracting flaws in the film’s coherence.
Although I hate to phrase my thoughts quite so simply, the bottom line is that the book is better than the movie. But the movie is worth checking out in its own right. I would be curious what somebody who had never read the book would make of the movie, whether they would appreciate it more since they wouldn’t be comparing it or if they might appreciate it less since they lacked going in the understanding of the unusual chronology. Although it falls short, it’s still a good attempt to adapt a book that was not written to be easily adaptable.
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