MOTHER NIGHT (52)

Directed by: Keith Gordon

Starring: Nick Nolte, Alan Arkin, Sheryl Lee, John Goodman

The Pitch: A Nazi collaborator during WW2 is actually an American spy - but, when the war is over, is unable to tell anyone the truth. From the book by Kurt Vonnegut.

Theo Sez: Hard to say (not having read the book) how true an adaptation this is, but it certainly doesn't feel much like Vonnegut's deadpan-absurdist style - perhaps because it holds on to the deadpan without finding a way for the absurdism to filter through. The author's books often do it by using the form itself - through ultra-short chapters, or doodles and pictures, or snatches of song interrupting the text - but this has no equivalent cinematic sense of play (unless alternating colour with black-and-white can count as playfulness) : the story unspools placidly, casting the same impartial eye on the hero's very sincere love for his dead wife as on his semi-fantastic conversations with Adolf Eichmann or his encounters with "The Black Fuhrer of Harlem". Everything should ideally work on two levels at once, which is actually two more than the levels it does work on ; only Nolte's superbly-controlled performance manages to find a tone and stick to it, his Howard Campbell a crushed romantic trying to face the enormity of what he's done, a one-man symbol for a century racked by conflicting ideologies. He almost manages to impose his mournful gravity on the disparate elements floating weightlessly around him.