Cert 15 | ★★★★★
Known for his work as director and producer on the acclaimed Larry David HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, Robert B. Weide has spent four decades of his life attempting to make a documentary about his friend and mentor, the late and very much missed writer and intellectual Kurt Vonnegut.
Fifteen years after the writer’s death, that film is finally being released, and not a second too soon.
Weide who has co-directed the film with award winning documentarian Don Argott (Last Days Here, Believer), presents a comprehensive, informative and hugely touching account of the writer’s life.
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Kurt Vonnegut
From interviews he conducted with Vonnegut throughout the years, to moving anecdotes told by the writer’s own family members posthumously, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck feels like a fitting tribute to the man who went on to inspire a whole generation of aspiring writers, intellectuals and broadcasters.
The film delves into Vonnegut’s ordeal when he was captured by the Nazis and kept as prisoner of war at a Dresden slaughterhouse during the city’s bombing by Allied forces in 1945. That experience went on to inspire most of Vonnegut’s work, including his bestselling novel Slaughterhouse Five, but also Breakfast of Champions and a number of short stories written through the years.
The film also recounts the writer’s relationship with his own family, notably how he was affected by the untimely death of his older sister Alice who succumbed to cancer.
After Alice’s death, Kurt went on to adopt all four of her children. This and other anecdotes go a long way into understanding what made the writer tick and what inspired his famously laid back approach to life.
Weide and Argott have made a thrilling and personal account of a man who stood for much more than many give him credit for. Anti-establishment and anarchic to the bitter end, Vonnegut is shown here to be a man of vociferous disdain for war. He’s presented here as a man who chose laughter over solemnity to deliver a message of peace that has gone on to live in the hearts of all those of who loved his work.
