Sometimes you can tell a date isn’t going to go anywhere within the first five minutes. I met a guy for a drink earlier this year who had “so it goes” tattooed on the inside of his forearm. “Ah,” I said, “Kurt Vonnegut!” “What?” he replied. I thought of this exchange one recent Saturday when I left the sunshine revellers to their tinnies and entered the cool dark of my local Picturehouse to watch Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. I had the screen entirely to myself – for good reason, you might think.
Unstuck in Time required two directors because the first one, Robert Weide, became so close to Vonnegut over years of filming (he first approached the American author about a documentary in 1982, and their working relationship ended with Vonnegut’s death in 2007) that he became a character himself. It’s appropriately meta for a film about an author who, at one point in Breakfast of Champions, enters the narrative to tell Kilgore Trout that he is a character in a book.
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