REVIEW: Slapstick of Another Kind

(Note: I actually wrote this movie review for the BMMB, but I always felt it was overbaked. Now, with Vonnegut's passing, I thought this might be a good time to post a review of one of the (justifiably) lesser known film adaptations of his work, especially of one I discussed specifically this past weekend. You'll also see I used "loving sadness": When I wrote So It Goes, using that again just felt right. This review is the new, improved version; you can read the long-winded one here.)

“I was born in 1922, and I call my generation of writers the class of 1922. This would include Gore Vidal and James Jones and others all born around then. We are the last generation of North American writers to be inspired by other novels rather than movies--Norman Mailer, John Updike, we wrote book books, and just thought that a movie sale was found money. Now young writers write books intending to be movies. But I never did that.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

When authors sell the movie rights for their works, it’s the studios that actually make the devil’s bargain. Although each novel comes with a built-in audience, that audience is harder to please than, say, the stereotypical teenager who’s never cracked open any book on their own, much less one translated for the screen.

Therefore, it’s ironic that Kurt Vonnegut Jr.--a classic “unfilmable” author if there ever was one--has had not one, but two artistically successful theatrical films that both he and his fans are happy with: Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night. But Vonnegut didn’t completely escape unscathed. Back in 1982, writer/director/producer Steven Paul somehow got hold of one of the author’s lesser known works and brought it to the screen. In so doing, he forgot the meat, heart, and damn near all of the skeleton.

Hi ho.

Slapstick the novel is a short breath of a tale. Like Mother Night and Bluebeard, Vonnegut structures it as a memoir--in this case, that of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a 100-year-old, 2-meter-tall, Neanderthal-like man who served as the last President of the defunct United States and now lives in the ruins of Manhattan, renamed the “Island of Death.” With the sad humor of Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton, Dr. Swain recalls his strange life, which always revolved around his twin sister Eliza. The two grew up together in seclusion at their family’s abandoned Vermont estate--their parents thought the two were as stupid as they were ugly. But when the siblings touched heads, they became geniuses that would have made Albert Einstein look average. After their unwilling separation at age 15, Wilbur eventually becomes President on a campaign of artificial families (based on an essay from one of Wilbur and Eliza’s “lesser” thinking sessions) and the slogan of “Lonesome No More,” all while American civilization crumbles around him. But Eliza still remains a part of his existence, even as an absence he can’t fill until death.

Not a perfect book, Slapstick still could have made an interesting little movie with its absurd humor laced with loving sadness. An enterprising screenwriter or a visionary director could have strengthened some of the plot’s weaknesses and inherent difficulties. But writer and director Paul proves himself neither as he recasts a somewhat flawed satire into an insanely unfunny and tedious low-rent comedy.

Hi ho.

Instead of an elderly Wilbur, the film opens in outer space, or at least a badly painted backdrop of stars and galaxies. A glowing flying saucer floats by, looking suspiciously like an escaped extra from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Two god-like disembodied narrators--one male, one female--begin discussing the problem of Earth, where their previous gifts of intelligence to the Chinese have gone astray. They decide to try again, this time with a model American family blessed with power, beauty, and intelligence. And thus the twins Wilbur and Eliza are born unto the beautiful couple of Mr. and Mrs. Swain, played by Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn.

Let me say that again: The beautiful couple played by Jerry Lewis and Madeline Khan. Just wanted that to sink in a bit....

The babies, unfortunately, are so ugly that their appearance sends the doctors and nurses into hysterics and causes Mr. Swain to accidentally fall out a hospital window and into a convenient trough of mud (it’s a Lewis thing...go with it). A distraught but concerned Mrs. Swain takes her doctor’s advice to seclude the twins and allow them to live out their hopefully short days without ever knowing they are freaks. The doctor handles the hiring of the staff to take care of the children, including a Chinese cook, a Brooklyn handyman, a French maid, and Sylvester, a mortician-turned-butler played by Marty Feldman. Meanwhile, the 3-inch-tall Chinese ambassador (Pat Morita) announces that they are withdrawing their embassy from the rest of the civilized world.

Fifteen years later, the Swains are still distraught; their supposedly doomed children are still alive. As Mrs. Swain vents her frustration to her doctor--strangely, Mr. Swain stays mostly in the background for the run of the movie--a badly animated flying fortune cookie suddenly appears, scattering everyone on the patio (and Mr. Swain down the cliff, of course). The cookie lands, and out jumps the miniature former Chinese ambassador. He tries to convince the Swains that their children--who their doctor insists are morons--are in fact geniuses and America’s only natural resource. Somehow, this all ties into the Chinese wanting to negotiate for approval to take control of gravity. Somehow, but screenwriter Paul forgets to tell us.

Hi ho.

At this point, we’re 20 minutes into the movie, and we haven’t even seen Wilbur and Eliza. With that amount of build-up, you’d think that there would be a big reveal. Instead, we get the maid tucking them in for the night. Once she leaves the room, Wilbur and Eliza (also Lewis and Kahn, in heavy make-up and pj’s) get up to review several of their essays and to waltz to music while the hired help party away downstairs. It’s a routine to which everyone’s grown accustomed, until Mr. and Mrs. Swain phone Sylvester in mid-reverie. For the first time since the twins were born, the parents are coming to visit . . . and the President is coming along.

And that, sadly, is more than half the movie. No film can contain every part of a novel, but Paul guts Slapstick, ripping away much of its story and shredding the remnants. Gone are the Island of Death, Wilbur’s presidency, the King of Michigan, Eliza’s forgiveness, their writing of So You Went and Had a Baby in a five-day orgy, Wilbur’s granddaughter Melody, fluctuating gravity, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa and her slaves, and so on. Wilbur’s plan of artificial families is regulated to a final plot point, and “Lonesome No More” is just an exclamation from Wilbur when he awakens from electroshock therapy near the end. All that remains in the film is Wilbur and Eliza’s backstory--hardly half of the original work. Without the aching tragedy and conflict that Vonnegut created, the movie is infused with an inertia that doesn’t let up until Paul finally and completely abandons the story for a Hollywood climax that undermines any meaning left over.

Are you ready?




You’re sure?




Okay . . .




The twins are aliens. Hi ho.

The Wilbur and Eliza of Vonnegut’s novel are freaks, but they’re still human. Like everyone else, they have to muck through their lives and deal with the pains inflicted by loved ones, even by themselves. In many ways, that’s what the art of slapstick is about. But Paul doesn’t understand that--he sees pratfalls without pathos. So he goes for sap instead.

Paul errors badly in trying to make a goofy comedy out of a satire. Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night succeed because their makers didn’t attempt to shoehorn them into a certain genre style. The films follow their books’ rhythms, and like the books, create something unique. Vonnegut is not a comedy writer, but Paul ignores that, and the result is that Vonnegut’s gentle absurdity is replaced with clumsy slapstick and comedy with a capital C. The family doctor is named Dr. Frankenstein. Comedy! Wilbur’s mandated disguise at military school is a pair of Groucho glasses. Comedy! Wilbur sticks his smiling mug through a portrait’s hole where the head used to be. Comedy! Hey, watch the flying fortune cookie! Comedy!

And we all know that there’s nothing funnier than a Chinese man speaking bad broken English. Ugh.

There are some admittedly nice touches. Laurel and Hardy, to whom Vonnegut dedicated his novel, make a silent cameo appearance. When Wilbur and Eliza appear at the top of the stairs, intelligent and well-attired for the first time in public, the scene is strangely moving and slightly surreal. The make-up for the two giant Neanderthanloids also is very good, although slightly toned down--Eliza looks cute rather than ugly. Tall, but cute. And Paul actually provides the movie’s best joke: Because gasoline has become too rare or expensive, the remaining cars and airplanes run on chicken “products.”

However, any goodwill won is lost by the film’s obvious low budget and Paul’s incompetence with his own material. Many of the sets look like they were lifted from the nearest television sitcom, and the staging for several of the physical comedy bits is placid, cluttered, and slow. Eliza and Wilbur’s height varies wildly throughout the picture: when Sylvester introduces the twins to their parents, his head only comes up to their waists, but later on, Eliza is obviously only a head taller than her butler. Then there’s a prolonged scene in Air Force One, where the President discusses America’s situation with the plane’s captain. It’s nothing more than a big set-up: the camera eventually pulls back to reveal that the compartment is filled with chicken cages. But Paul already spoiled his punchline by telling the joke earlier in the picture, and the entire scene becomes a waste of time.

For Vonnegut fans, the resulting mishmash becomes even more painful whenever something from the novel creeps through. The miniature Chinese ambassador’s press conference at the start of the film begins with a line from the book: the Chinese are severing relations because “simply there was no longer anything going on in the United States which was of interest” anymore. It’s a very simple, subtly funny line, but Morita’s ensuing dialog slides downhill from there, ending with, “Up your ass with Mobile gas!” Not to mention the tiny sumo wrestlers laughing and high-fiving behind him. Other pieces of the original novel peek through, but they’re distorted or dimmed through Paul’s cracked circus mirror.

The dreary cast doesn’t help, either. Lewis and Kahn sleepwalk through their dual roles; Kahn seems uncharacteristically half-asleep. Perhaps she was trying to play “dumb,” but both her mother and daughter characters stretch the same blank expression throughout the picture. Lewis gets more mileage out of his make-up as Wilbur, but his physical comedy is lifeless and most of the time spontaneously out of place. For his part, Feldman saves some dignity by channeling Alec Guinness’ Professor Marcus from Ladykillers, but resorts to mumbling as the film lumbers to its denouement. Morita seems to be the only one having any fun with his role, and it’s unfortunate that most of his lines are Paul’s and not Vonnegut’s.

By itself, Slapstick of Another Kind isn’t as painful as, for instance, a Tom Green waste of celluloid. But by taking the novel’s title literally and forgetting to read beyond the first hundred pages, Paul misses out on most of the story and thus its meaning. There is little slapstick in the original Slapstick. But Paul can’t even handle his own handiwork, and the haphazard remains only remind us of what could have been. Ironically, the traces of Vonnegut’s inherent absurdity save the film from its own utter dullness; perhaps that’s a kind of comedic poetry after all.

Hi ho.