Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which chronicles the unusual life of Billy Pilgrim, bounces back and forth between farcical satire and a sobering, anti-war depiction of World War II and the 1945 bombing of Dresden. Unfortunately, the 1972 film adaptation is light on the farce, and the end result is a movie that gives us a little too much Billy Pilgrim and not quite enough of Vonnegut’s irreverent, quirky humor.

Billy has a strange problem — he has become unstuck in time. As a result, he floats freely from one moment of his existence to another, never knowing which part of his life he’ll be living next. In a completely unrelated (but equally bizarre) incident, Billy is abducted by the fourth-dimension-dwelling Tralfamadorians, who view time as a series of moments that occur simultaneously. Every moment simply exists — there’s no then or now, no past or future.

Billy’s time-jumping lays a perfect narrative foundation for the film to build on, resulting in a story that hops, skips and jumps between the important happenings in Billy’s life. The focus remains on Billy’s time as a soldier in World War II, which is the key moment in his life that the rest of the story builds around. Vonnegut’s goofy cast of characters show up, and creepy Paul Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby both get even more attention in the film than they receive in the novel.

The attention both characters get — the added dialogue, extra screen time — and their interactions with Billy highlight Slaughterhouse-Five’s biggest problem. The novel isn’t about Paul Lazzaro, or Edgar Derby, or even so much about Billy Pilgrim. Or, rather, the fact that Billy is the protagonist isn’t what makes Slaughterhouse-Five great — the appeal of the book comes from Vonnegut’s fantastic narrative, which relies far more on descriptive passages and amusing tangents and anecdotes than dialogue or character interaction.

Without Vonnegut’s authorial voice guiding the quick jumps between moments of Billy’s life, we don’t see him as the bemused, aloof character he is — a man who never seems to really care too much about anything. Except, perhaps, the philosophical teachings of Tralfamadore. And the omission of Kilgore Trout, a character whose wacky science-fiction novels seem to be Vonnegut’s way of poking fun at himself, leaves the film lacking just one more of the elements that make Slaughterhouse-Five such a quirky, insightful work of literature.

Even so, the quality of Vonnegut’s novel shines through on screen in spots. The inherent humor in the series of events that make up Billy’s war experiences is sometimes even better portrayed on film — his conversation with the leader of the British POWs is especially hilarious. Some of Vonnegut’s themes also make their way into the film — Billy’s wife Valencia does her best to stand for the absurdity of consumerism, and the tragedy of war comes across just as strongly as it does in the book.
As the film approaches its conclusion, the grim scenery of post-bombing Dresden evokes a stronger reaction than any moment leading up to that inevitable finale. Edgar Derby’s almost casual execution by firing squad, his punishment for taking a useless figurine in the aftermath of Dresden’s destruction, perfectly communicates the utter senselessness of war and its rules and guidelines.

But, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut: so it goes.