Film review: Slaughterhouse-Five
Director George Roy Hill's film adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five bravely tackles the meta masterpiece.
According to Hollywood scuttlebutt acclaimed writer William Goldman turned down the chance to pen a Slaughterhouse-Five screenplay (1), because he thought the science fiction classic was unadaptable. He had a point; Kurt Vonnegut’s autobiographical novel is a structurally complex time bending anti-war tale. Nonetheless, director George Roy Hill followed up box office hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which Goldman wrote, by translating this challenging tale to celluloid.
Picking up the baton, writer Stephen Geller stripped out its metafictional element to produce a surprisingly straightforward telling of this twisty tale, focussing on the extraordinary life of Billy Pilgrim. Both book and film explore the author’s traumatic World War II experience as a US prisoner of war, where he witnessed Dresden's devastation by the Allies’ bombing raids, which killed 25,000 people and impacted him profoundly. Imprisoned in Slaughterhouse-Five, he and his desperate cohort survived the firestorm only to be forced to scour the city's ravaged ruins for bodies in the aftermath.
Importantly, Vonnegut’s narration and personality, which are infused into the novel, have been removed. It’s a bold choice which leaves Pilgrim, who is unstuck in time, as the movie’s protagonist and cuts out much of the novelist's personal perspective. Billy's curious chronological predicament is explained in the opening scene when he types a letter to a local newspaper (2), but the audience is asked to suspend disbelief with no further explanation, which adds a sense of ambiguity – is Billy really unstuck or suffering PTSD? While his WWII experiences are told in linear order, the rest of his life is scattered out of order throughout the film. Even weirder, Billy is abducted by fourth dimensional aliens from planet Tralfamadore, who treat him like a zoo animal.
Perhaps because of his odd existence, Pilgrim doesn’t have the agency or charisma to intrigue an audience. He's passive; a leaf blown about by incredible circumstances. Instead, Hill’s deft direction balances the competing demands which make the film interesting. Flashbacks and forwards - often cutting from close-ups on Billy’s face - suggest he’s experiencing past and future. Time-strewn moments are linked seamlessly; early on we see him showering in the PoW camp when the camera pans downwards to reveal a young Billy in the local swimming baths. Helplessly, the youngster is grabbed by his father and slung into the pool to sink or swim. In a telling metaphor, it cuts to the bottom as the powerless child sinks with the muffled sound of his father yelling in the background.
Billy’s unusual perception of time is captured by having past and future moments intertwined. This is evident in a grim foreshadowing, when the the chronologically confused character lies dying on a mountainside following a plane crash which killed his father-in-law and colleagues. Covered in blood, he is found by rescuers repeating ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in German, and we discover Billy has jumped back to WWII and is reliving the moment he is taken to the infamous Dresden slaughterhouse.
Slaughterhouse-Five works best when exploring Vonnegut’s anti-war message. Pilgrim encounters historian BC Rumfoord while recuperating from the crash, who bombastically justifies Dresden's destruction and ignores Billy’s eye-witness account. Rumfoord defends the Allies’ attack on the previously unharmed city with a blistering tirade listing the Nazi’s own war crimes, but his argument is juxtaposed with refugees streaming out of Dresden as the German war effort collapses (3). It’s a poignant reminder there are innocent on all sides.
In the aftermath, Dresden’s historic architecture is so utterly destroyed the city resembles the surface of the moon. The PoWs were forced to search for and then burn civilian bodies on bonfires, but Hill does not flinch away from the horror, instead he keeps the camera trained on a dead child burning for an uncomfortable moment to hammer home the consequences of war. Released in 1972, deep into the US’s disastrous conflict in Vietnam, the Slaughterhouse-Five film tries to capture the anti-war mood which the book did so successfully. Vietnam is referred to when the middle-aged Pilgrim is visited by his son, who is a green Beret proud of fighting the Vietcong, which contrasts jarringly with the horror of Dresden.
However, this message is somewhat undercut by the ending. Unlike the book, which climaxes with the aftermath of the bombing raid, the film finishes with Billy living in harmony on Tralfamadore with actress Montana Wildhack. Despite being observed in their habitation dome by the aliens, they are blissful after the birth of their child. Billy has bought into the aliens’ fatalistic belief that nothing in life can be changed, so he lives in the moment. While it’s an understandable perspective when you are constantly tossed around on time’s choppy sea, it’s a bittersweet moment which robs the underlying argument of its power and provides an ill-fitting conclusion.
Somewhat unfairly, Slaughterhouse-Five was compared to the incendiary sci-fi adaption of Clockwork Orange and deemed unsuccessful by some critics (4). It’s true Stanley Kubrick’s shocking film escaped the original text’s shadow and became a classic in its own right. However, Slaughterhouse-Five won the Jury Prize in Cannes as well as Saturn and Hugo Awards (5). Vonnegut called it a ‘flawless translation’, but the movie failed at the box office and faded into the background. But there is much to be admired, it’s funny, shocking and thoughtful, with a strong message, which has only became more important. In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, it could have been a mess, instead of an interesting and coherent piece of cinema. While not a classic, the Slaughterhouse-Five film is a brave and largely successful take on a truly original book.
References
Goldman’s rumoured decision not to adapt Slaughterhouse-Five is mentioned in the AFI Catalog.
The critic Lee Attwell was impressed by this elegant opening scene for its simplicity and pointed out there was no ‘time machine’ to help audience understand the characters time travel in his essay, Two Studies in Space-Time.
This point is also raised by Peter F. Parshall in his article, Meditations on the Philosophy of Tralfamadore: Kurt Vonnegut and George Roy Hill.
Neil D. Isaacs was particularly critical of Hill’s adaption of Slaughterhouse-Five in his article, Unstuck in Time: Clockwork Orange and Slaughterhouse Five.
This information was from the film’s Wiki page.
Further Reading
What would a modern film version of Slaughterhouse-Five look like? Acclaimed director Guillermo Del Toro and Charlie Kaufman had discussed tackling Vonnegut’s masterpiece in 2013 but it never happened. So it goes.