Peace, free will, and art are … the essence of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; but George Roy Hill's movie of the same name is redolent of different juices entirely. Hill's burden was heavy: he not only had to reconceive the story according to his own filmic lights, he had to reverence the details of the fiction as so many cult objects for his projected audience. And his artifices do not suffice to carry the load.

His failure is similar to that of Mike Nichols with Catch 22. [Joseph] Heller's text was so cluttered with cult objects that Nichols' reconception of the story in film form, with abundant optical and structural gimmickry, was topweighted with the demands of the literary paraphernalia. Hill never even tried, as Nichols clearly did, to integrate the obligatory items into the movie's story. The appearances of Wild Bob from Cody, Wyoming, and of Eliot Rosewater in a Lake...