Whatever’s new to me is new. If you’d asked me recently whether Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Breakfast of Champions,” from 1973, had been adapted for a movie, I’d have scoffed that anyone would be foolhardy enough to try to film such a metafictional, intertextual, phantasmagorical whizbang. Imagine my surprise to find that the movie exists, came out in 1999 (before I was reviewing films), and my gleeful shock to learn that it was written and directed by Alan Rudolph, one of my favorite living directors. On the other hand, I also figured out why I never heard of it at the time of its release: it was a flop, with a total box-office take of $178,278 (on a twelve-million-dollar budget). Unsurprisingly, the critics were complicit in its failure: it’s deep underwater on Rotten Tomatoes, which lists reviews disdaining it as “unwatchable,” “tasteless,” and “boring.” (The New Yorker merely ignored it.)
But now it’s back. It was recently rereleased in theatres in a high-definition restoration and is also now streaming on several services. Watching it, I discovered a movie that is anything but an artistic failure. Rudolph’s approach to the novel is audacious and his direction both utterly distinctive and appropriate to the freewheeling material of the book. Vonnegut’s novel is all primary colors, with its big-swing satires at American follies (including the dignified presumptions of literature), and Rudolph’s adaptation excels because it taps into his deepest creative forces—much of his prior work had already been moving in the same direction, albeit from afar. It was a longtime pet project of Rudolph’s, and its star, Bruce Willis, financed the movie independently, liberating the director (as he told Jim Hemphill, at IndieWire) from any studio constraints. The film, a quarter of a century after its release, now seems like one of the most thrillingly original Hollywood products of its time, comprehensively different from just about anything else being released back then—which may be exactly why critics and viewers rejected it.
The movie’s premise is intricate, clattery, and self-consciously stretched to the limits of plausibility. It’s centered on a town called Midland City, where the car dealer Dwayne Hoover (played by Willis) is a local celebrity, thanks to his high-energy performances in splashy TV commercials for his dealership. He’s also miserable. He’s unhappy in his marriage, and his wife, Celia (Barbara Hershey), though supportive, is unhappy, too; he’s entangled in a push-and-pull affair with his secretary, Francine (Glenne Headly); and he’s hostile to his son, George (Lukas Haas), who, calling himself Bunny and adopting Liberace-style garb, aspires to a career as a pianist and crooner. But Dwayne’s main misery is existential: he doesn’t recognize himself when he sees his image plastered in ads around town or hears the cheerful chiming of his name at work.
Meanwhile, subplots push to the fore. Dwayne’s sales manager and best friend, Harry LeSabre (Nick Nolte), has a sexual secret—he likes to wear women’s undergarments and accessories—and his fear of exposure makes him act strangely and get on Dwayne’s nerves. (The decades that separate the novel’s publication from the film’s release show here politically: Vonnegut writes, “It wasn’t merely a comical secret, either. Harry could be arrested for what he did on weekends.”) An incarcerated man, Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps), takes the similarity of his and Dwayne’s names as destiny and, upon his release, goes to the showroom in boisterous quest of a job. Far away, in the tiny town of Cohoes, New York, a fiction writer, Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney), who lives in hermit-like obscurity and whose fantasy fiction is published as the respectable content of porn magazines, is worshipped by a patron of the arts, Eliot Rosewater (Ken Hudson Campbell), and invited to take part in a Midland City arts festival. When Trout’s name and work get local publicity, the alienated and increasingly delusional Dwayne—who, in his incipient madness, believes that other people are programmed machines and he alone is human and free—becomes obsessed with the writer and craves his authorial insights.
Rudolph fills the contours of these antic story lines with a wild array of incidents and decorates them with similarly wild ornamental distractions. The costumes and the sets, the exterior décor of the cityscape, and even the signage of remote roads all teem with idiosyncratic, epigrammatic, sloganeering, color-splashed, light-spangled paraphernalia—sharp-edged and graphic, twirly and tangled, or squishily biomorphic. The world of Rudolph’s movie is awash in the blather and squall of media. Television and radio, billboards and print ads echo clamorously in the way the characters speak, dress, and lead their lives; irradiated and penetrated by the airwaves, they talk at one another and talk to themselves, muttering and ranting in soliloquy and argument (sometimes indistinguishable). Rudolph’s free-form use of onscreen effects and graphics extracts in visual form the manic contents of this inner verbal roar.
Another subplot, involving an environmental disaster at a suburban development that Dwayne owns, unleashes yet another level of harrowing directorial inspiration. A mishap that a police officer minimizes as “somebody just dumping sludge in the creek” causes streets and skies to fill with smoke, pedestrians to don industrial-grade masks, and cleanup crews to wear hazmat suits. Rudolph grimly delights in the apocalyptic ramifications: smoke in the sky, a river bubbling darkly like hot fudge, and a collective air of panic amid the ordinary frenzies of daily life. When a mighty traffic jam results, the tooth-gritting absurdity winks at Godard’s “Weekend,” but the absurdity ramps up to a streak of horrific reality as environmental refugees shuffle grimly along the roadside. Yet the disaster is just a short-term synecdoche for the ongoing pollution of land, air, and water that’s depicted and discussed as an appalling yet commonplace enormity throughout.
As befits the agony of a car dealer, the movie’s road action is filmed with flair, as in the deranged thrills when Dwayne speeds recklessly through town and the strange sense of automotive captivity when he’s recognized through a car window. One of the movie’s best gags comes in a parking lot, when the mindbent Dwayne, stumbling effortfully from his car to his workplace, finds the asphalt giving way like rubber at each step. (With its combination of environmental catastrophe, literary follies, marital despair, and satire on commercialism, “Breakfast of Champions” is the prime progenitor of Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of “White Noise,” which it also rendered artistically obsolete in advance.)
Rudolph’s hyperactive visual world is expertly realized by the cinematographer, Elliot Davis, and the two of them cram the frame with distorting angles and extreme closeups, which, far from getting into characters’ souls, make them seem chillingly remote. Deep-focus shots teem with people and metal and junk, in scenes that capture the peacelessness of a society choking on merchandise and jangled with salesmanship. The movie offers phantasmagorical twists on unexceptional banalities. In one amazing scene, Dwayne’s staff greet him on his birthday wearing photographic-Dwayne masks, sending him into a self-consuming spiral of anxiety. Dream sequences and fantasies, a talking thousand-dollar bill, and a series of jump cuts of pushy patrons in a diner echo a collective, endemic madness. Ultimately Dwayne, stifled and spluttering, snaps, and the real world takes over. Meanwhile, Kilgore, his dream of fame approaching, also sees its chimerical agonies. Thanks to a virtuosic sequence in which Rudolph revises and expands one of the most famous cinematic fantasy tropes—the penetrable mirror, from Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus”—Kilgore gets a free pass from the universe and collects the real rewards of his hard-won wisdom.
The performances in “Breakfast of Champions” match its direction in extravagant inventiveness. If I didn’t know that Bruce Willis—made to look a bit jowly and given wire-rimmed glasses and a floppy forelock of hair—was the star, I wouldn’t have recognized him, which I mean as a high compliment both to him and to Rudolph. Here, the actor, relieved of his overfamiliar suave-joker attitude, is both more ordinary and more extraordinary than usual: he’s energized and tenderized, his dynamic personality set into physical and mental overdrive and his façades stripped away to bare the vulnerability that they defend. Headly, if I were retroactively voting, would get a Best Supporting Actress nod from me for her verbally deft yet high-relief combination of wry tenderness and wounded dignity; Nolte, ever complex, is both bluff and fretful, red-hot and timid, and displays some chilling comic virtuosity when his character finally blows a gasket (on live TV, no less). Finney, not quite free of Anglicisms, rages and growls and endows Kilgore’s bluster with Falstaffian pathos.
The spectacular wonder of “Breakfast of Champions” comes not only from what Rudolph accomplishes but from a sense of astonishment at his having done so. Nothing in his filmography suggests the sort of comprehensive extravagance that this film delivers from start to finish. All the same, its possibilities lurk throughout his illustrious, though underrecognized, career. His first masterwork, the modernist melodrama “Remember My Name,” from 1978, is as sleekly understated and coolly internalized as “Breakfast of Champions” is overstated and overflowing, and yet it flaunts a control of camerawork, of startlingly expressive images, that suggests possibilities to meet any choice of subject. With “Trouble in Mind,” from 1985, Rudolph borrows classic film-noir moods and exaggerates them with playfully parodic images. In such loving retro-satires as “The Moderns,” from 1988 (a fantasy of Paris in the twenties, complete with Hemingway), and “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” from 1994 (about Dorothy Parker, the Algonquin Round Table, and the early days of The New Yorker), his high-style sense of exaggeration clicks with his view of reality, inner and outer. In melodramas such as “Choose Me” (1984) and “Afterglow” (1997), his takes on real life lift off with an operatic sense of artifice.
Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” is a live-action cartoon of a novel, and it offers Rudolph a hyperbolic tone and a tangled ball of hot-wire seriocomic connections that blast away any naturalistic inhibitions. In response, Rudolph lets his directorial vision loose here, a giddy cinematic id that displays more imagination and more daring in every cathode tube and every street sign, every growl and every rant, than most Hollywood movies have in their whole run time. It’s exactly the sort of norm-ignoring and industry-defying freedom that turns many critics into scolds. ♦
