Soggy Breakfast Has No Juice

Some books were meant to be made into movies.

Some books are so profoundly important and relevant that the evolution from page to reel is natural and unforced.

Some books are so primed for the leap to the silver screen that they practically scream their readiness to the world.

Breakfast of Champions is none of these books. The movie was doomed from the beginning. This ill-conceived, ill-fated and horrendously-executed adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s cult classic novel of the same name follows the fleeting sanity of Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis), the owner of a used-car dealership and the most popular guy in Midland City. The film also follows Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney), a slightly kooky science-fiction writer on his way to Midland City to attend the town's Fine Arts Festival as the guest of honor. When the divergent paths of these two strangers ultimately intersect, all hell breaks loose. For good measure, Nick Nolte takes a second crack at a Vonnegut adaptation (he starred in a movie version of Mother Night) as Harry LeSabre, Dwayne's closet-transvestite salesman.

So, where does it all go wrong? Everywhere. But, first and foremost, the movie suffers from a simple truth:

Breakfast of Champions is a story best conveyed in words.

Pictures, though they may be worth a thousand words, can't provide the precision of expression that is offered by the written word, a precision that Vonnegut exploited with mastery. Actors, delivering the material in a drastically reduced number of lines in the limited span of a two hour movie, can never hope to match the brilliance of Vonnegut's prose. It's futile to even try.

The mood of the film doesn't help the matter. Defined by the triteness of the setting (a generic middle-America suburb/commercial center) and the over-exaggerated antics of the actors, the tone is downright campy, a far cry from the insightful and sharply satirical mood of the novel. Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover takes an unfortunate step backwards from his performance in The Sixth Sense by making a complete ass of himself. (Perhaps this is a sign that he should go back to doing Die Hard-type fare.) The rampant television commercials advertising Dwayne's cars? Mind-numbingly annoying. And worst of all, Nick Nolte looks like he has a facial tick that spreads like a plague throughout his body, resulting in a haltingly jumpy and downright silly performance. And what of Albert Finney, the well-respected actor who appeared in films like Annie and Washington Square, who arguably plays the most sane (relatively speaking) character in the film? His decision to play the part like a half-crazed babbling beggar adds to the cumulative mediocrity established by his fellow actors.

Every time Dwayne puts a pistol in his mouth, flirting with the thought of suicide, the audience can't help but wish for him to pull the trigger--at least to end his escalating insanity along with the audience's suffering. Each time, he is interrupted, leaving the audience with no choice but to hold on (just barely) until the end. Even then, the climax of the story, which occurs when Dwayne meets Kilgore in a hotel bar, does nothing but confuse the audience even more. Dwayne comes to believe that he is a character in one of Kilgore's novels, and this realization sparks a series of violent outbursts. This mindless violence is followed by another epiphany, in which he realizes...something. What that something is isn't exactly clear, and is open to interpretation. All we know is that Dwayne finds his alienated wife and son and resolves things with them (in a rare moment of clarity in which he realizes his love for them), after which he gets carted off to jail. And then the movie ends.

Huh?

People loved the novel because of its tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic candor and because of its simple acknowledgement of a world going mad. It was a wacky satire that sparred with issues of societal conformity and rampant consumerism. The movie takes the consumerism slant and clubs you over the head with it repeatedly--so repeatedly, in fact, that you lose sight of its importance. It takes the essential plot elements of the novel and blurs them together to create two hours of incoherent nonsense. In short, director Alan Rudolph's vision of Vonnegut's cynical tale boasts all the clarity of a disturbingly silly dream, conceived in a fit of misdirected illumination.