BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Hollywood Pictures/Flying Heart Films Director: Alan Rudolph Writer: Alan Rudolph, novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Cast: Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly, Lukas Haas, Omar Epps, Will Patton, Chip Zien, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Does America produce too much wealth, and do too many Americans make too much money? Of course not. Production and accumulation of wealth are not the problems. The issue is consumption--what we do to get that wealth and what we do with the money we make. Left-leaning critics of the American way point to the manner the powerful U.S. arrogates to itself the right to make decisions for other countries (the Vietnam War as the principal example), to what the country must do to continue extracting abundance from both the land and its people (pollute the land, create ugly malls, inundate the air waves with moronic commercials), to the selfish attitude that prevents the world's mightiest nation from considering the inequities of the income produced both at home and abroad.
A good deal of this reproach was reflected in the literature, theater and movies of the 1970s, at the time that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote "Breakfast of Champions" (1973) to append his convictions to the political climate. Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point," which hit the screens in 1970, is a foreigner's take on the aggressive, materialistic style of living, a film written partly by Sam Shepard. Stuart Hagmann's "The Strawberry Statement," which came out as well that year, treats the Columbia University riots, the sometimes violent demonstrations by privileged kids against the allegedly racist nature of the school's administration.
The corruption that has accompanied American prosperity has not gone away, though serious attempts have been tried to make the distribution of income more equitable and to cut back the destruction of the air, land and water. Despite all the shots we've taken, the air waves are still desecrated by mindless commercials for inconsequential products, the span between the higher earners and the poor is the greatest in the industrialized world, and large corporations are drowning small stores while downsizing workers and homogenizing the cities and suburbs with tasteless malls. Pointing out these evils, "Breakfast of Champions," a novel considered by some to be impossible to film, has been captured for the screen by Alan Rudolph--a director noted for experimentation with indie films like "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," "Afterglow," and "Welcome to L.A." Considering the absolutely non- commercial nature of his "Breakfast with Champions," we can imagine that its all-star cast must have taken far less than their usual compensation for doing the movie, one which comes across as so off-the-wall zany and surreal that its targeted audience would have to be a small one indeed.
Aside from the difficulties you can expect from the nonlinear narrative, aiming at targets not as a sharpshooter would but as would a farmer firing a shotgun full of buckshot flying hither and thither, "Breakfast" ridicules profanities too familiar to be shocking in our own time as they were when the novel was published. Filmed by Elliot Davis as though the genre were a Merry Melodies cartoon shot by John Waters and not a genuine dispatch by live actors, "Breakfast of Champions" centers on the bespectacled and toupeed Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis), the principal celebrity of the town of Midland City (filmed in Twin Falls, Idaho) by virtue of his near monopoly of local TV commercials for his car dealership. "You can trust Dwayne Hoover," is his motto, an obvious giveaway to a knowing movie audience for his probable debauchery. He is in the midst of a nervous breakdown, wondering "who am I?" and about to eat his gun, when he is called to the table by the maid for his breakfast of champions--a large plate of fried eggs, bacon, pancakes, potatoes and toast. (Later in the film, the titled breakfast of champions would become a martini.)
Because of his total attention to his dealership, he has distanced himself from his depressed and suicidal wife, Celia (Barbara Hershey) but is to be powerfully affected later on by an aging, sardonic writer of sci-fi novels, Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney--who is in some ways a stand-in for Mr. Vonnegut), who travels to Midland City to receive an award during the town's first arts festival.
Every character in Alan Rudolph's land of plastic, polyester and all-around schlock is nuts, and Rudolph must have had a grand time characterizing Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte), secretly a transvestite who dresses like a mortician during the day to cover up his problem; Francine (Glenne Headly), who works as Hoover's receptionist and pliable girl friend; and Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps), an ex-convict who looks up to the materially successful Hoover as though the salesman were the creator of the universe. When the cranky Kilgore Trout looks about him at the pretentiousness, the phoniness, the polluted waters, the very sterility of the place, we do not wonder that he envisions an alternate world, a tropical paradise free from capitalism's messes, where he can become young and innocent again.
Rudolph certainly means well, having the grit to make this movie from a novel whose criticisms of society are still valid but whose shape is old-hat. And the first-rate cast including Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte, Glenne Headley, and Barbara Hershey are to be honored for contributing to the effort at a presumably lower pay scale that they would customarily require. But "Breakfast of Champions" is so chaotic that after twenty minutes you can easily lose patience for its scattershot arrangement and redundant reproaches. For a more sober approach to the issue, go back to the classics and open Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt" (1922), about a man from the twenties who likewise lived in a town of standardized architecture and interior decorations who, for a time, was reborn during a trip to Maine but who later fell back to his habitually reactionary and insular ways.
Rated R. Running Time: 110 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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