Word: vonnegut
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...Vonnegut, being a middleman, can't get very far with ideas. He doesn't link up Dresden with any inherent political or social conflicts it symbolizes, implying instead a state of moral squalor necessary for such a catastrophe to have taken place. And his vision is only that of Bill Pilgrim, a stupid if sweethearted protagonist, bumbling between the Ilium upper-middle-class of Vonnegut's present, the Dresden holocaust, and the planet Tralfamadore, where he cavorts with a nubile Hollywood starlet in a fantasy-world designed to protect him from being fatally bound to his depressing earthliness...
...exactly the materials for War and Peace, or even a Rabbit Redux. But Vonnegut is entertaining: he works with a writing line of aptly terse description prone to break into fragments of anecdote whenever a theme needs developing. And he cuts into the narrative with his own voice, full of pathos expressed in the right phrases. "So it goes," the Tralfamadorian "lament" for death repeated by Vonnegut whenever he's forced to report it, is at first a "would you believe twenty killings?" shtik--only to become a Shantih, Shantih of a different stripe and level...
...VONNEGUT actually makes clear is that technology has brought us to the point where you can say nothing analytically sensible about massacre. With a lot of no-crap Yankee charm, he also attacks all who would defend the Dresden bombing, from academic historians who age into monsters to breakass generals and Allied patriots. But Billy learns on Traifamadore only that life has good moments and bad ones, and war is a bad moment that should not be concentrated long...
...Vonnegut might yet recognize the underlying unrelieved fatalism of his Slaughterhouse view, and may move beyond it having admitted the limits of his hero. So may many of the high school students and undergrads who think Billy a traditional pilgrim moving to some new point of enlightenment, and not a sad comment on the heroic temper of our times...
Luckily, the film rights to the book feel to a middleman as craftsmanship and intelligent as Vonnegut himself--and certainly more restrained in his celebration of innocence. I would never have expected these qualities from the man's record: director George Roy Hill has previously given us such pedestrian derivatory fairy tales as Hawaii and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Here he sticks to the book in knowledgeable, workmanlike fashion, even clearing up some narrative mess, making the whole more consistent and straightforward and thus more powerful. What he and a skilled novice screenwriter (Stephen Geller) have done...