Review of Catch-22 (1970) by Mjs M — 22 Jun 2008

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a novel I've been meaning to getting around to reading, but most of my time and attention has been taken by various movies. So it's probably for the best that finally just saw the movie version, because I was probably never going to get around to that book. This is the third movie from director Mike Nichols after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe and The Graduate, both of which went on to become classics.

The film is an anti-war satire which is theoretically set during the second world war, though I get the impression the exact war zone is largely irrelevant. The film's satire largely targets military bureaucracy as well as the general insanity of war. Released in 1970, this anti-war message was very topical given the events of Vietnam. The film is frequently compared to other war satires of the era like Kelly's Heroes and Robert Altman's M*A*S*H.

The film isn't particularly funny, so as a straight ahead comedy it probably fails. The film instead uses a certain ironic wit. For example, early in the film it is established that if someone wants to go on hundreds of bombing missions they must be insane and should be grounded, the catch is that they need to ask to be grounded and if they ask they must not really want to go on these missions and thus isn't insane and can't be grounded.

As the movie progresses it grows this irony goes from simple satire to outright surreality to the point where a man gets split in half by the propeller of a plane. By the last third of the world of the film has turned into what is clearly a Kafkaesque hell to which there is seemingly no escape.

My main complaint is that the central story takes a very long time to entrench itself and afterwards it is still rather messy. Initially it was hard to tell who I was supposed to be following, there were a number of characters who each seemed to get equal screen time leading the viewer to believe this was a strictly ensemble piece. but then about a half way through the film begins to focus strictly on the John Yossarian character played by Alan Arkin, which is rather disorienting.

What's more there are a lot of things in this that feel extraneous. There are a lot of moments of ironic strangeness that do little to progress the plot but which is included anyway, probably just because it was a memorable portion of the book.

That's the thing about this movie, most if not all of the scenes in the movie are rather clever, witty, and ironic; but they don't really come together to create a particularly coherent story. I would recommend it as a nice work of angry satire, but as a whole I'm not sure it really works. I guess I'll have to actually read the book after all.