What could be a more fitting theme for Alan Rudolph's phantasmagoric screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novel "Breakfast of Champions" than that flowery 1950s ballad, "Stranger in Paradise"? The song, which runs through the movie like an ironic leitmotiv, distills an Eisenhower-era mood of sanctimonious freeze-dried optimism tinged with paranoia that the movie conjures with a demonic fervor.
Those were the days, the movie reminds us, when it was almost a heresy to disparage the booming affluence of a society that television, then in its infancy, promoted as an unfolding paradise on earth.
In subsequent decades, of course, the pendulum swung so far in the other direction that when Vonnegut's satire was published in 1973, it was almost a heresy (italics)not(end italics) to disparage a corrupt, "plastic" culture poisoned with a thousand toxins, from Watergate to Muzak.
Today the wild exuberance with which that novel ridiculed the grossness and absurdity of American greed and Babbitry seems somehow naive. It is with a bitter self-awareness that we accept the price of our present comfort as a willed, guilty blindness to the problems of the rest of the world and to serious inequities within our own society. [New Sincerity, indeed. - pk] In such a cynical climate, the vigor of Vonnegut's satire can seem overheated and obvious. That's why Rudolph's film, made in a spirit of gleeful early-'70s irreverence, also seems naive.
Visually evoking a composite modernity that embraces half a century of tackiness, the movie looks and feels like a frantic, live-action psychedelic cartoon. Although its many targets, including small-town conformity and greed, sexual prudery and mass-cultural boorishness seem easy and familiar, the movie flails at them with a wild, free-for-all energy. In its tone, the movie might be described as a John Waters film divested of camp.
Yet if you accept "Breakfast of Champions" as a work unambiguously committed to spray-painting the screen with the author's satiric vision of modern America as an absurdist madhouse, it still churns up quite a head of froth.
A man delivers a sales pitch through a face on a thousand-dollar bill. As one character walks through a parking lot, the ground seems to give way like rubber under his feet. Another character eases himself through a mirror to become a reflection of himself staring back from an alternate universe.
The only thing wrong with such clever tricks is that their accumulation tends to smother the narrative and diminish the larger metaphors.
"Breakfast of Champions" is set in mythical Midland City, a suburb of nightmarish sterility through which runs an unnaturally blue river choked with chemical wastes. It is a place whose gleaming factories belch smoke and where the soil in a recently constructed housing project has been deemed contaminated. Midland City's leading citizen and local hero is Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis) a buttoned-down, toupeed car salesman who in a series of garish television commercials, embodies American success as a grotesque exercise in robotic self-promotion.
Over the course of the film, Dwayne who has alienated his neurotic wife, Celia (Barbara Hershey) and his son, Bunny (Lukas Haas), an aspiring lounge singer with a taste for glittery costumes who slowly goes insane (or sane, depending on how you look at it). Leading him toward his doom (or his salvation) is Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney), an obscure, crusty old science-fiction writer who travels to Midland City to be the guest of honor at the town's first arts festival.
Much of the movie takes place at Dwayne's surreal car dealership, which is crammed with hideous tchotchkes and whose piped-in soundtrack of Martin Denny exotica is attuned to its win-a-free-trip-to-Hawaii contests. In this chirping, soulless garden of kitsch, Dwayne's toadying employees do things like put on Dwayne Hoover masks to collectively greet their boss.
We meet his troubled right-hand man, Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte), a closet transvestite who is on the verge of exploding from withholding his secret. Other satirical characters include Dwayne's smile-button of a secretary (and sometime girlfriend), Francine (Glenne Headly), and Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps), a desperately eager car salesman who regards Dwayne as a capitalist god.
The sterling cast, led by Willis, who deftly breaks his typical mode to play Dwayne, pumps a lot of adrenaline (sometimes too much, as in Nolte's case) into their caricatures, with Finney especially fine. In the end, you have to admire Rudolph for making a film this defiantly uncommercial.
In many ways, "Breakfast of Champions" is an incoherent mess. But it never compromises its zany vision of the country as a demented junkyard wonderland in which we are all strangers groping for a hand to guide us through the looking glass into an unsullied tropical paradise of eternal bliss.