![]() It’s also too much time to spend with Nolte, looking every wrinkle and sag of his 56 years, playing a man in his early 30s. Novels stimulate the imagination in ways a film has to demonstrate, and the detailed account of Campbell’s early life in Germany has a distracting dress-up quality to it. This is a case where the film may be too faithful to the source. Different media, different problems, different talents. And in sticking to the book’s flashback structure, with Campbell narrating his memoirs from an Israeli prison where he is awaiting his war crimes trial, Gordon draws too direct a line between himself, as storyteller, and Vonnegut. Lee’s accent sounds like a schoolgirl’s impression, and she never quite fits the charismatic description Campbell gives of her. The young director has, however, made some mistakes-among them the casting of Sheryl Lee, “Twin Peaks’ ” Laura Palmer, as Campbell’s German wife, Helga Noth. “Mother Night” is a dark and disturbing tale, unrelieved by any off-hand humor from Vonnegut’s prose, and Gordon (“Midnight Clear”), with a script by the television veteran Robert Weide, has made no compromises. The apolitical Campbell, who had accepted the spy role more as an acting challenge than a call to patriotism, is stunned all these years later by the insight that he may have done far more harm than good. But to the Vonnegut faithful, it’s a terrific touch.Īs Campbell stands stiff as a stone in Greenwich Village, Vonnegut’s look suggests that the moral has become fact. It’s been a favorite trick of Vonnegut to interact, as the author, with the characters he creates, and viewers who don’t recognize him or that literary mannerism will be puzzled by the scene. Campbell’s off-camera voice explains that he’s stopped because he can think of no reason to go on, and Vonnegut, in close-up, looks at him with a combination of sadness and contempt, as if he were commenting directly on what we, the audience, have seen up to that point. (Nick Nolte), an infamous onetime Nazi radio propagandist, who is standing frozen in the middle of a sidewalk. Vonnegut is just one of many people seen walking around the story’s hero, Howard W. It’s a wordless cameo, lasting maybe two seconds, but Gordon uses the moment in a way that does the author proud. Late in Keith Gordon’s faithful, if occasionally awkward, adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel “Mother Night,” Vonnegut himself appears, as an extra in a scene in post-World War II Greenwich Village.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |