Film review: Unstuck in Time is an absorbing account of a complex man

Forty years in the making, it offers previously unseen interview material with Kurt Vonnegut and his adult children

What emerges is a portrait of an artist as a young man suffering from undiagnosed PTSD

★★★★☆

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (15A) takes its subtitle from Vonnegut’s best-known novel, Slaughterhouse 5, in which the hero, Billy Pilgrim, comes ‘unstuck in time’ as he tries to cope with the psychological fall-out of being caught in the cataclysmic bombing of Dresden during WWII. 

The novel was rooted in Vonnegut’s own experience of being a prisoner-of-war in Dresden during WWII, and much of this film — written by Robert Weide, who co-directs with Don Argott — is concerned with teasing out parallels between Vonnegut’s own life and his ‘aggressively unreal’ and blackly funny novels, among them Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions and Sirens of Titan. 

Forty years in the making, it offers previously unseen interview material with Vonnegut and his adult children, along with films adapted from his novels and animation derived from Vonnegut’s doodles and drawings. 

What emerges is a portrait of an artist as a young man suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, a condition that would haunt his life for good and ill: a complex, distant and occasionally cruel father, he was also a good-natured philanthropist who believed, simply but profoundly, that ‘to be funny is a good thing to do with a life.’ 

It’s not without its flaws: Weide, a personal friend, is acutely aware he is too close to his subject to be truly objective, but Unstuck in Time is an absorbing account of a complex man.
(Cinema release)