Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time is a playful, unconventional portrait of a playful, unconventional writer. Bob Weide and Don Argott’s lively, fascinating biography takes its cues from the author in two significant ways. Firstly, it takes the non-linear structure from Vonnegut’s best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five (the documentary’s title is that novel’s opening line: “Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time”), employing the writer’s time-hopping, almost science-fiction approach, mashing up interview material shot over 40 years, archive footage, film clips from Vonnegut’s films’ adaptations and appearances (he cameoed in Back To School) and animated sequences based on the author’s own drawings. Secondly, it apes the M.O. of Vonnegut’s late-in-the-day bestseller Timequake, which in part is about the difficulty Vonnegut had in writing Timequake, by charting Weide’s decades-long quest to get Unstuck In Time completed and into the world. The result doesn’t completely work, but it’s an exuberant, engaging and highly entertaining primer for one of the kings of counterculture novelists.
A colourful, revealing, frequently funny portrait of key moments in the author's life
The Timequake strand is the least successful. In 1982, having devoured Vonnegut’s work in high school, the 23-year-old Weide sent the author a letter asking to make a film about him. To his astonishment, the writer said yes, and Weide accumulated mountains of footage over the years with both Vonnegut and his family, which gives the film an overview that is both expansive and detailed. But what also happened over those years is that Weide formed a genuine friendship with his hero — Vonnegut gifted the filmmaker a set of Victorian candlesticks as a wedding present, left him an answerphone message to celebrate his Emmy win for Curb Your Enthusiasm, and gave Weide a name-check in a later book. While it’s hard to begrudge Weide the patently real, warm friendship, it’s also impossible to discern much in the way of criticism, and his sidelines into his own story dissipate the momentum of Vonnegut’s tale.
The film is on much more solid, enjoyable ground when it’s just a plain old Vonnegut biography. It’s a colourful, revealing, frequently funny portrait of key moments in the author’s life — from being a POW in Germany (he put his head against a tree trunk and foresaw the fire-bombing of Dresden), to honing his style and sensibility writing PR spiel for General Electric, to becoming the voice of a generation with works like Slaughterhouse and Breakfast Of Champions. There is tragedy — the death of his sister Anne from cancer and taking on her four children, bringing his brood to seven, turned his quiet writer’s life upside down — and some moments where he lets you down — after huge success, he ditched his supportive wife and family for a photographer and glitterati lifestyle. Still, equal parts pessimist and optimist, he emerges as great fun, and Unstuck In Time does what all good author docs should do: make you want to revisit or check out the books immediately.