Oh, what a fine mess Alan Rudolph has gotten us into.  I disliked his previous film, Afterglow, with an irritation that grew upon my second viewing, and I had huge reservations about him directing an adaption of Kurt Vonnegut’s pretty much unfilmable novel.  While the resulting effort is such an insanely disjointed affair, I can’t help but be entertained, and yes, impressed.

Bruce Willis plays Dwayne Cooper, the owner of the largest Pontiac dealership in Midland City.  While prosperous, he seems to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and is desperately searching for a sign of what to do.  In the book, Hoover’s lapse is partially explained by the death of his wife, but in the movie, she’s alive, albeit barely in that she’s played by Barbara Hershey.  Go figure.

    Anyway, his head of sales (Nick Nolte) secretly dresses in drag and his estranged son is a gay pianist and he’s sleeping with his secretary and there’s this science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, whose work appeared in dirty magazines, who’s on the way to Midland City and—ahh, screw it.

    Read the book.  It’s great.  Then come back and read the rest of the review.

    Done?

    Liar.

    No, no.  You can’t see the movie until you’ve read the book.

    I’m warning you.

    Okay, fine, but you’re missing out.

    The movie takes a fair share of liberties with the book, eschewing several characters and adding several more, including Omar Epps as a recently-released prisoner who has a name similar to Dwayne’s.  Despite all of these differences, and a complete transformation of the ending (Vonnegut, a character in the book, doesn’t appear in the film.  Well, he does, but he’s not playing himself.), it still manages to capture the tone of the novel.

    In much the same way that Terry Gilliam adapted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Rudolph takes to Breakfast of Champions by forcing over-the-top performances out of all the actors and shooting the whole thing in vibrant color with loads of eye-popping effects and an excellent score by Mark Isham.  Willis, Nolte, Epps, Gleanne Headley, Albert Finney (as Trout) and Vicki Lewis seem to be having a lot of fun, and Rudolph keeps his characters from acting in anything resembling a predictable manner.

    Crisp dialogue (much of which is at least partially taken from the book) helps as well.  The film slows down during the final half-hour, with repetition setting in (Dwayne seeing visions of his wife again and again) in time for you to notice the film’s major flaws.  That is, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.
What’s the deal with Hoover?  Why is Epps’ character in the film?  Why does Nolte keep insisting he’s in the army?  What the hell is going on?  What does it all mean?  Of course, the book contains a nice, oddball, zen ending, but the movie is strictly a Hollywood climax.  It’s totally inappropriate and it may cause a standard audience to shrug and go “What the hell was that all about?”
 
    So it’s a cryptic, all-star mess, and one that seems out of its’ time.  It’s almost as though some drug-addled producer from the 60’s decided to relive those glory days where you could have big budget movies with huge casts that don’t make the least bit of sense.  God bless ‘em—or else we’d never have seen this monstrosity that barely managed a theatrical release before a video dumping.

    Midnight showings, anyone?