If you’ve never watched a single second of Curb Your Enthusiasm — fix this, please — you’re still probably familiar with series director Robert B Weide, through the many million memes that use the Directed By card and theme music as a punchline.
Weide, who has authored various projects on American comic greats — including Lenny Bruce, the Marx brothers, WC Fields; not to mention an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1981 novel, Mother Night, starring Nick Nolte — is almost embarrassed to introduce himself as one of those directors who will feature prominently in the film.
It’s a tough call. His friendship with subject Kurt Vonnegut becomes both the project’s greatest attribute and, occasionally, an Achilles heel.
Filmed over an unruly 30 years, there are many scenes to recommend this extensive yet scattershot documentary portrait of the Breakfast of Champions author.
As Weide concedes from the start, the sprawling production schedule and the friendship born from the same, rules out any possibility of a conventional biopic with a run time less than, say, that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 894-minute miniseries, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Taking cues from Vonnegut’s countercultural classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Weide jumps between periods and themes, using the friendship between the director and his subject as an anchor. The device allows the viewer to discover odd tics and quirks — notably Vonnegut’s often inappropriate gallows humour — in step with the younger Weide.
Still, despite various crises and diversions, there’s a sense that Vonnegut, like this documentary, never really steadies himself after Dresden, where, as a young soldier during the second World War, he survived the Allied firebombing as an American prisoner of war.
Life goes on, nonetheless. His early years as a struggling writer in the US’s postwar advertising copy and short story boom are interesting, as is his family life with three children and four adopted nephews.
Perhaps mirroring the author’s own experiences, the film gets off track when Slaughterhouse-Five proves an era-defining hit.
Some members of his surviving family continue to feel betrayed by his sudden move to New York from Cape Cod, where they remained behind. We never meet his second wife, despite various mutterings of marital discontent and a relationship that lasted from 1979 until the author’s death in 2007.
It’s a huge omission in a film defined by a fuzzy version of Stockholm syndrome. There is, against this softly-softly approach, an undeniably moving relationship between Weide and Vonnegut. And Weide is never less than an engaging guide.
