Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (film review by Mark R. Leeper).

In ‘Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time’, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, most of his early life is told through home movies. Later, the narrative is assembled from photographs, magazine articles, books, manuscript pages and footage shot by director Robert B. Weide and others. Weide took almost forty years to make this film, beginning to plan it in 1982 and starting principal filming in 1988. He is best known for documentaries about famous comedians, as well as for ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’.

After Vonnegut is introduced as either insane or the only person who is not insane, the documentary settles into a more traditional biographical approach. His family was once fairly well-to-do, but the Great Depression wiped out much of their wealth. They lost their home and he had to leave private school. In public school, he became immersed in popular culture and developed a fondness for comedians such as Laurel and Hardy.

Vonnegut was the family comedian from an early age and described his own books as ‘screamingly funny’. During World War II, he became a prisoner of war in Dresden and survived the city’s infamous firebombing. Vonnegut later claimed that he had seen Dresden’s destruction in a premonition before it happened. After the war, he worked for General Electric as a publicity writer, but eventually had to choose between an industrial career at GE and a career as a writer. It was not much of a contest. He left GE and wrote full-time.

Vonnegut seemed to live by phrases he repeated throughout his work. ‘Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”‘ ‘So it goes.’ It is not entirely clear that these expressions mean much beyond Vonnegut’s personal attachment to them, but they became inseparable from his public identity.

Near the end of the film, Weide notes that all of Vonnegut’s books remained in print. One commentator observes that ‘Vonnegut was championed by the people, not by the critics’, although he eventually received recognition from the literary establishment as well. Either way, Vonnegut was a writer whose outlook was shaped by a persistent fear of failure. Some of his books succeeded brilliantly, while others did not. So it goes.

Released theatrically on 19th November 2021.

Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4), or 6/10.