Catch-22
Based on: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Written by: Luke Davies & David Michôd
Directed by: George Clooney, Grant Heslov & Ellen Kuras
Starring: Christopher Abbott, Kyle Chandler, Hugh Laurie, George Clooney, Daniel David Stewart, Austin Stowell, Rafi Gavron, Graham Patrick Martin, Pico Alexander, Jon Rudnitsky, Gerran Howell, Lewis Pullman, Grant Heslov, Tessa Ferrer, Jay Paulson, Giancarlo Giannini, Harrison Osterfield
“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
For a ten year old boy seeking diversion from the boredom of a bleak, cold Haligonian winter, still looking to make new friends in a new town, the opening line in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller was an intellectual and emotional bombshell. Here were concepts that had never crossed my mind. Not one, but two types of forbidden love. It also struck me as funny as hell, and I decided I had to read this book.
The librarian checked it out to me, since Halifax didn’t suffer from the same suffocating Puritanism that afflicts the United States, but doubtlessly wondered if a prepubescent was ready to tackle Heller’s asynchronous and reiterative writing style.
I took to it like a cliché to water. I fell madly in love with Yossarian the first time I saw him. And the book. And the anti-war Kafkaesque sentiments. I walked with Yossarian down the mad, dark, rain-swept streets of a nearly-destroyed Rome, watched him sit in that tree, watched advertisements on TV and understood Milo, and saw in General Scheisskopf the superior officers my dad used to rant about when he was at home and had had a few.
A few years later, I decided it needed a reread. The American high school I attended didn’t have it in their library. Too controversial. Americans still considered anti-war to be unpatriotic, and those brave enough to read the book probably didn’t like the cackling old Italian who compared America’s life expectancy to that of 500 million year old frogs.
They made a movie (Mike Nichols) in 1970, and it was a pretty good movie, but you can’t capture in 90 minutes what it took Heller ten years to construct in his vast novel.
The book deserved a series, uncensored and unafraid. Somebody actually tried making a series for American network television in the 1970s, and it died a no-doubt merciful death as a pilot production. What was then “the big three” didn’t do uncensored and unafraid. They barely managed incompetent. Imagine Mrs. Roberts’ third grade glass reenacting a Fellini film. It would not be pretty.
So: the new series.
First off, it’s absolutely true to the book in terms of dialogue and plot, including chronological jumps. It’s a faithful recreation of the settings and actions as set forth in the book. I’ve seen many potentially good shows and films ruined because some moron decided the source material needed ‘improving’ to make it more relevant to 13 year olds in 2019. And of course, there’s a creative impulse, as well. Screenwriters have an understandable aversion to simply quoting from the book.
But this is one of the most perfectly written books of the 20th century. There is no room for improvement, and a million ways to fuck it up. So they elected not to fuck it up.
That leaves the acting. I had faces and voices in my mind’s eye, and sometimes Heller’s deadpan and rapidfire dialogue left me ‘hearing’ the characters as sounding somewhat like the narrator in Lemony Snicket (or Pushing Daisies). Since I don’t have Asperger’s or am psychotic, I expected the acting to be more variegated. It is.
The actors are all much more photorealistically human. The voices are more animated, and more insane. Everyone’s crazy in the story, and they all know they are crazy (except Aarfy, who is the craziest of them all, and Scheisskopf, who is just plain nuts) but the minute they admit they are crazy, that is a sign of sanity, and thus they aren’t crazy any more. But not being crazy in the situation they are in means they are crazy, certifiably so, and all they have to do is say they are crazy. Someone really should write a book about that.
George Clooney is Scheisskopf, and he’s having a tremendous time of it chewing the scenery. Given that he serves as a kind of focal point for the general madness that prevails, it’s an apt job of acting. (Clooney had to overcome my visualization of his character, who I envisioned as looking and sounding like Senator Tom Cotton. But Clooney actually makes Scheisskopf even more bull goose looney.) Aside from that, the characters are all well cast—Doc Daneeka is perfect.
If they stay true to the book—and it looks like they will—then this is going to be a stupendous series.
Sometimes you just can’t improve on the source material, and the best you can do is respect it. This series does.
Now on Hulu.