Kurt Vonnegut travels through his extraordinary life in Unstuck in Time,

KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME (Robert B. Weide & Don Argott, 2021)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, November 19
www.ifccenter.com

“I had never seen him so at ease; they had found each other, as the subject and the filmmaker. It felt like a friendship,” Nanny Vonnegut says about her father, author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and director Robert Weide in Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, an extraordinary documentary opening November 19 at the IFC Center.

In 1982, twenty-three-year-old Weide wrote a letter to Vonnegut, wanting to make a film about him. Much to Weide’s surprise, the award-winning author of such novels as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle wrote him back, agreeing to the project. Shooting began in 1988 and continued through Vonnegut’s death in 2007 at the age of eighty-four and beyond. During those years, the two men became good friends, so much so that Weide began doubting his ability to complete the film. “I don’t even like documentaries where the filmmakers has to put himself in the film. I mean, who cares?” he asks in one of several sections where he talks to the camera, concerned that he was becoming too much a part of the story.

After a moving moment in which he discusses putting the camera down and simply enjoying his time with Vonnegut, Weide admits, “Prior to that, I had always been concerned that the friendship might infringe on the film; this was the first time I realized that things had flipped so entirely now that I was worried about the film infringing on the friendship. That was a realization for me that I was maybe in trouble.”

Fortunately, however, Weide and codirector Don Argott, who was brought in to help navigate through Weide’s fears of having grown too close to Vonnegut, keep the main focus on Vonnegut, who opens up about his childhood, his schooling, his early jobs, and, ultimately, his writing career, reflecting on a life well lived yet filled with tragedy, from the death of his sister and her husband to his mother’s suicide and his experiences in Dresden during WWII. Vonnegut is shown giving a lecture in a church, taking a train with Weide, driving through his hometown of Indianapolis, visiting the house where he grew up — and getting sentimental when he sees the casts of his and his siblings’ hands on the top of a small cement wall — and attending his sixtieth high school reunion.

Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, gives Weide boxes and boxes of home movies and slides, while their sisters, Nanny and Edie, and Vonnegut’s nephews, Jim, Steve, and Kurt Adams — who Vonnegut and his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, took in after the deaths of his beloved sister, Alice, and her husband, James Adams — speak openly and honestly about him, including their extreme disappointment when, upon finally gaining success as a writer, he dumped the devoted Jane for younger photographer Jill Krementz. Over the years, Vonnegut kept sending Weide tapes of his numerous public appearances, so the film includes a treasure trove of clips from speeches, television appearances, and commencement addresses as well as early, annotated drafts of Vonnegut’s writing.

The film discusses the aforementioned books in addition to The Sirens of Titan, Breakfast of Champions, and Mother Night, which was turned into a 1996 movie written by Weide, and explores such favorite Vonnegut characters as the author’s alter ego, Kilgore Trout, and Billy Pilgrim. The title of the film comes from the first line of the second chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” The concept of time is a leitmotif of the documentary, highlighted by the comparison between the decades it took Weide to complete the film, which is significantly about the making of the film itself, and the years it took Vonnegut to finish his last novel, Timequake, which ended up being significantly about the writing of the book. And just as Vonnegut and his children share poignant memories, Weide inserts some of his own, particularly about his wife, Linda. The parallels between Weide and Vonnegut are striking. “How fucked up is that?” Weide says after noting another coincidence.

Robert B. Weide and Kurt Vonnegut became close friends while making documentary over several decades

Weide also speaks with Vonnegut’s friends and fellow writers John Irving and Sidney Offit, his publisher Dan Simon, his biographer Gregory Sumner, novelist Dan Wakefield, and In These Times editor Joel Bleifuss, who gave Vonnegut a forum in his final years. Actor Sam Waterston reads from several of Vonnegut’s works. “He made literature fun. That was huge,” critic David Ulin says.

Along the way, two elements stand out: Vonnegut’s love of laughing — his infectious laughter is sprinkled throughout the film — and his ever-present Pall Mall. In a cute touch, Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Weide (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth) and Argott (The Art of the Steal, Believer) animate smoke coming out of his cigarettes in still photos.

On the first page of chapter two of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut also writes of Billy Pilgrim, “He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between. He says. Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” Weide and Argott have captured the essence of Vonnegut the person and Vonnegut the writer in Unstuck in Time, a must-see, utterly fun portrait of a man who never knew what part of his life he was going to have to act in next but always did so with a contagious sparkle.