Word: yossarianic
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Arkin's complex, triumphant performance is due in part to good genes ?he looks more like Yossarian than he does like Arkin. In part it is due to a virtuoso player entering his richest period. But in the main it is due to the quirky talent of Director Mike Nichols, whose previous successes have been wrung largely from the bland and facile. It is as if Neil Simon were to turn out Endgame or Peter Sellers to turn into Falstaff...
With psychiatric insight, Nichols has constructed Catch-22 like a spiral staircase set with mirrors. Yossarian ascends by dols, units of pain, glimpsing pieces of himself until he comes to a landing of understanding. It is 1944, Mussolini has collapsed, and Allied victory is inevitable. But for the bombardment group, there is no surcease. Colonel Cathcart compulsively keeps raising the number of missions required before an airman can be rotated Stateside...
...Yossarian moves numbly through it all, reminiscent of the Steinberg drawing in which a rabbit peers out of a human
...Yossarian's mind circles five times to that instant in which McWatt calls out, "Help him!" Each time Yossarian's arc of memory lengthens as he bends to aid the mortally wounded Snowden ?until at last he sees the man's flesh torn away and his insides pour out. It is at once the film's most repulsive and instructive moment. From that time Yossarian cannot accept the escape bargain his superiors finally offer him: "All you have to do is like us." He cannot betray his fellow victims of what Norman Mailer called "exquisite totalitarianism." It is then...
...because of the director's persistent focus, it all makes the kind of perfect nonsense that finally is the concomitant of wisdom. Like Through the Looking Glass, Catch-22 overturns commonplaces and makes them fresh. Its optimism is despairing; its doubt is born of faith. "When Yossarian runs away in the end," says Heller, "I never said that he would get all the way. I wrote: 'The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.' But he tries, he changes. That's the best that can be said for any of us." It is the best that...