Robert B. Weide and Don Argott’s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time chronicles Weide’s decades-long attempt to tell the life story of his favorite author. Alternately fawning and fumbling but consistently fun, the documentary yokes together bits and pieces of the footage that Weide shot of Vonnegut over the years with straight-to-camera inserts of himself talking about just why this film has taken him so damn long to finish.
Weide accompanies Vonnegut to his childhood home in Indianapolis and lets the author describe his family’s one-time Ambersons-like status there (the family tree’s branches were heavy with high-profile businessmen, architects, and society ladies). We see how Vonnegut the frustrated writer mined his experiences as a public relations flack at General Electric in the postwar economic boom years for his first novel, 1952’s Player Piano, a dystopian story about company towns and automation, before quitting to write fiction full time.
Oddly, the film spends almost more time discussing the biographical aspects of Vonnegut’s life and career—the turmoil of his sister’s death, his divorce from his first wife, how he turned to novels after TV decimated the magazine market for short stories—than it does digging into his work. It’s a curious lacuna, given Weide’s frequently stated devotion to Vonnegut’s novels, and as such Unstuck in Time often resembles a conventional artist documentary.
More a student of comedy than practitioner, Weide has a nerdy on-camera persona that balances well with what he shows of Vonnegut. A cherubic, tipsy-on-his-own-jokes presence, the author is represented here in interviews that Weide shot with him starting in the early 1980s, as well as in clips from talk shows and public speaking engagements. Weide and Argott could have easily settled for a film about Vonnegut’s comedic instincts, his ease with irreverent one-liners being one of the reasons that his books are so beloved by a certain kind of puckish adolescent. But they make a worthy effort to pull back the veil on the man and show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.
Of course, Vonnegut having a darker side is hardly a secret to those even barely familiar with his work. Though laugh-out-loud satirical, his novels like Cat’s Cradle and Mother Night zoom in on subjects like the apocalypse, cataclysmic wars, societal ruptures, and soul-deadening technology. Weide tries to use Vonnegut’s World War II military service—as a POW held in Dresden the night that it was firebombed by the Allies, he had to clean up the blackened corpses left behind—as a lever for getting behind the author’s chain-smoking bonhomie.
While Unstuck in Time reveals a lonely and despairing side to Vonnegut that he largely hid from the public, the true nature of his wartime trauma and sometimes despairing outlook proves a tough nut to crack. In the documentary, his two daughters describe how they learned more about his wartime experiences from novels that drew directly on it, like Slaughterhouse-Five, than from him personally, and Weide has little more success. Unstuck in Time also expends a lot of energy trying to justify its subtitle, attempting to show that Vonnegut had a quality akin to how Slaughterhouse-Five’s Billy Pilgrim experienced all moments in time in random rather than linear order. The filmmakers ultimately drop that tangent in the interest of wrestling Weide’s gargantuan archive of footage into some tangible shape.
Weide worries near the end of Unstuck in Time that while he expected to be concerned about whether the documentary would impact his and Vonnegut’s friendship, it turned out that the real question was could this friendship keep him from making a better documentary. The latter concern turns out to be mostly true, as Weide openly casts off any deeper authorial duties and concentrates on finishing a film about a man who changed his view of the world. A different director could have likely examined Vonnegut’s status in American literature more clearly and asked tougher questions of him, and the resulting film would be very much worth seeing. But even with its gaps and missed opportunities, so is Unstuck in Time.
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