Vonnegut-based film disturbing but engrossing

Mother Night: 1996, Starring Nick Nolte, John Goodman. Directed by Keith Gordon. Rated R



Even though it's practically an unknown movie, Mother Night is one of the most disturbing and engrossing stories I've ever seen on screen.

The story is simple: an American man (Nick Nolte) is in Germany at the start of WWII. He is approached by an agent of FDR's government (John Goodman) and asked to be a spy, set to become a propaganda spokesperson for the Axis, the American voice to the fascist movement. But during his speeches, he will make planned pauses, coughs and sighs, transmitting a sort of Morse code that even he doesn't understand. His transmissions are vital to winning the war.

When it's all over and he returns home, all of America treats him like the scum of the earth. No one will house him, feed him or be his friend. In fact, the only friends he can find... are the Nazis in America, who heard his broadcasts and treat him like a national treasure. Even his father-in-law, a member of the SS, tells him, "The ideals that made me proud to be a Nazi came not from Hitler, but from you."

The film is based on a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel, and most of the films based on his material have failed, from the '70s wacked-out version of Slaughterhouse 5, to the recent Bruce Willis disaster Breakfast of Champions.

Part of the charm of Vonnegut as a novelist is that all of his passages and characters are throwaway. He doesn't take them seriously, nor does he take himself seriously; and often that frivolity gives the novels all the more power to move you. It's all throwaway, but it's based on real sadness and outrage. That's often why they are so powerful in the mind.

On the screen, however, these flimsy images don't mesh well, and to keep the tone of the books backfires.

This film is different. Director Keith Gordon keeps the story intact but lets the tone determine itself, and as a result the story is at once funny in a Catch-22 sort of way, and at the same time just as sad. Both he and the cast play it straight, acting out the story to its own logical conclusion.

Nolte's character faces death at a war crimes tribunal at the end, in a cell next to famed far criminal Eichmann. He can't believe it_ and neither can we, and yet we can.

Because even though he helped his country, the face he showed the world was that of the worst kind of human being, the one that helps others rationalize the evil that they do. There is an image near the end where Nolte watches an old film reel of himself in total disbelief, the reflection of his younger self painted on his face. "That's not me! That wasn't me!" he murmurs.

Near the end, he finally pronounces the punishment for himself: "Be careful what you pretend to be... because in the end, you are what you pretend to be." Few films are as dark, ridiculous, sad, funny and twisted as Mother Night. It comes with the strongest possible recommendation, as it has not _ can not _ be seen enough.