Friday, May 25, 2012

Catch-22 (1970)



         Director Mike Nichols once described the “green awning effect” of becoming an A-list filmmaker. By notching two big hits in the late ’60s, Nichols convinced Hollywood he knew how to connect with audiences. Testing his newfound power, perpetually mischievous Nichols pitched a movie about a green awning outside a building—the movie would simply train a camera on the awning so viewers could watch different people pass underneath. According to Nichols, some executives expressed interest in this awful idea simply because they wanted to be in the Mike Nichols business.

          This helps explain why Paramount Pictures let Nichols spend a then-extravagant $17 million on an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22. A satirical and surrealistic World War II story exploring topics including bureaucracy, capitalism, and trauma, the book features a disjointed timeline and a sprawling cast—unlikely fare for a big-budget studio picture. Nonetheless, Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry (whose previous collaboration was 1967’s The Graduate) endeavored to focus the narrative by centering attempts by Captain Yossarian (Alan Arkin) to get relieved from his duty as a bomber pilot, his justification being that combat has driven him mad. (The title refers to a Kafkaesque military guideline stipulating that anyone capable of recognizing his own insanity must be sane and therefore suitable for combat.) Surrounding this main plot are myriad deviations, some into subplots, some back and forth through time, and some into the eerie world of dreams. 

          Viewed through the most forgiving lens, Catch-22 captures the chaos and horror of Yossarian’s experience by confronting him with an endless variety of bizarre characters and confounding situations—to watch Arkin drift from hysteria to stupefaction and various emotional states in between is to feel not just his anguish but also his desperate need for human connection. Viewed through a harsher lens—the perspective adopted by most critics during the film’s original release—Catch-22 epitomizes directorial overreach, with clarity falling victim to scale. Strong arguments can be made for both takes because for every brilliant moment that Nichols renders, seemingly a dozen others elicit bewilderment. There’s a lot of seesawing between “How did he think of that?” and “What the hell was he thinking?”

          Aesthetically, Catch-22 is perfection thanks to cinematographer David Watkin’s exquisite high-contrast lighting and Nichols’s startlingly complex shots, such as lengthy unbroken takes featuring actors’ movements choreographed with explosions and flying planes. (The appearance of Orson Welles in a small role feels like a wink to Welles’s penchant for similarly baroque sequences.) The other impeccable element of Catch-22 is a cast overflowing with talent: Bob Balaban, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Norman Fell, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, Charles Grodin, Bob Newhart, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, and—pulling double duty—screenwriter Henry. Particularly great are Balsam as a heartless commander and Voight as an officer whose entrepreneurial schemes achieve ghastly proportions.

          Yet the key element of Catch-22 is also the most divisive, and that’s the script. Occasionally the film’s extreme comedy and extreme tragedy mesh in memorably weird scenes, notably the sequence featuring an unforgettably gory onscreen death, but more often the satire is excruciatingly bleak, as when Nichols punctuates a rape/murder scene with an absurdist punchline. Nichols deserves praise for trying to nail such a difficult tonal balance, but whether he succeeded is another matter. The script also suffers for extravagance given that whole characters and subplots could have been removed.

          Because Nichols was one of the first directors to peak during the New Hollywood era, the grandiosity of Catch-22 and the failure of the film to recoup its cost during initial release now seems like a harbinger for subsequent examples of auteur excess—Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975); Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977); Spielberg’s 1941 (1979); and, of course, Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). Like all of those films, Catch-22 cannot be reduced to a snarky footnote. It’s a window into the creativity of an essential filmmaker, and its best moments are mesmerizing even if, for most viewers, the sum is less than the parts. It’s also weird as hell, which represents a certain kind of perverse integrity. So, whether Catch-22 strikes you as a work of unconventional genius or a case study in what happens when a director buys his own hype, it is unlikely to leave you unaffected. 


Catch-22: FREAKY

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not a great film of a difficult to capture book, but the scene you talk about - the person with the clipboard lamenting the death of an airman even though the airman is standing next to him and keeps saying he's still alive - is actually very true to the book, in which such absurd scenes abound. The recent TV series, which tried to be more faithful to the non-linear nature of the book, had similar tonal problems with comedy/tragedy next to each other. I think the nature of the book is that the comedy is to the fore at first, with the descent into tragey coming bit by bit. That's hard, I think, for all but the best film-makers to capture.

Aaron said...

I loved the series, personally, but didn't find this film especially engaging.

Guy Callaway said...

This is a masterpiece. That is all.

Unknown said...

It's not just about Yossarian and the madness of war - it's about America being a callous and opportunistic war profiteering nation, firming up these credentials not only after the D Day landings, but earlier with its campaign in the Mediterranean. Personally I don't think it's a misfire - it is a great film.

robin said...

I just lost a long comment that refutes all your factual errors (the plot is not linear, the joke you dislike is essential to the theme, etc.) and the strange attitude demonstrated in this review (there is no reason to insult the director for bravura film-making). This comment was eaten by the internet in a demonstration of the absurdity of life, the futility of action, and the ultimate triumph of technocracy over the individual. We are all Yossarian. This film is genius.

By Peter Hanson said...

2023 Update: Not that the world was holding its breath for my reappraisal, but I took a fresh look at "Catch-22" more than a decade after my last viewing, and undoubtedly through the prism of Mark Harris's extraordinary biography about Mike Nichols, which made me reconsider all of his work. The takeaway is that while the film's flaws are still just as evident to me as they were before, its strengths revealed themselves to me more powerfully on this viewing, hence an almost completely rewritten review. Where before I unwisely dismissed this picture as auteur-era hubris, now I view it as a bold attempt at rendering something unique.