Mother Night (1996)
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1996 Ben Hoffman
This has been a bad week for me as far as screenings go. MOTHER NIGHT was one of two films which made me leave the theater before the film was over.
MOTHER NIGHT is from a book by Kurt Vonnegut. As a film, it was extremely unreal and slow-moving to the point where my patience was put to the test and failed. I left.
Howard W Campbell, Jr. (Nick Nolte) is in an Israeli prison, accused of being a kind of Tokyo Rose for the Hitler regime. Campbell is given a typewriter and he writes the story of how the Americans asked him to pretend to be an admirer of the Nazis so he can spy for the U.S. His radio broadcasts around the world from Germany are full of vitriol for the Jews and Americans in general.
Campbell throws himself into the spy business with such force that we never really know whose side he was really on. Of course, he has been told that if he is found out, our government will deny any complicity. (Why? Were we not allowed to have spies in Germany with whom we were at war?)
When the war is over and Campbell comes back to the U.S., he assumes another identity but after a while he feels it is safe and goes back to using his real name, a name the whole world reviles, that of Howard W Campbell, jr. Why would he be so stupid?
Shortly thereafter, I left the screening.
Others wasted in the cast include Sheryl Lee, (Twin Peaks), Alan Arkin, David Strathairn, Kirsten Dunst, Frankie Faisan and Arye Gross.
Directed by Keith Gordon.
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