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MOTHER NIGHT (1996)
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As Mother Night opens, Bing Crosby is crooning a WW2 signature song, White Christmas, and American Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is being escorted into Haifa Prison in 1961 to stand trial for his war crimes. Campbell (Nick Nolte, Who'll Stop the Rain), was during the war the voice of Nazi propaganda, "the last free American" as his soothing graveled superior voice signed off every one of his radio broadcasts. Now he is given a manual typewriter, a ream of paper, and three weeks to write his memoirs, with Eichmann upstairs and nothing but black fabric ribbon for company.
How Campbell came to Haifa, and whether he is guilty, forms the movie's extended multi-layered flashback.
During the 1960s, Kurt Vonnegut wrote his three great books, all about the morality of World War II, which he experienced first as a GI and then as a prisoner of war during the Allied firebombing of Dresden: Slaughterhouse Five (1969) the most spare and pure, Cat's Cradle (1963) the best known and most clever, and Mother Night (1961) the least known and quite probably the best, whose moral, as Vonnegut explains in a foreword, is We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
As he did with The Singing Detective, director Keith Gordon (who played the precocious adolescent in Dressed to Kill) demonstrates considerable skill translating a complex novel of ideas into an absorbing screenplay. Vonnegut's three Sixties novel are masterpieces of emotionally bleached observation juxtaposed with moral quandaries in profusion. So it is with Mother Night -- whatever you may think of Campbell, you are sure to think something different a few minutes later.
To portray a man who is romantic and emotional in private, intellectually wry and yet virulently anti-Semitic in public, is no easy task; Nolte achieves it through verbal minimalism ("Yes, I've changed. People should be changed by world wars, or what are world wars for?") that contrasts effectively with the wrenching pleas of his love Helga (Sheryl Lee, best known as dead Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks), whose only allegiance is to their Nation Of Two (reich von zwei), a concept to which Vonnegut returned with Cat's Cradle's duprass.
Each member of a very distinguished cast is spot-on, among them John Goodman (Barton Fink) as Campbell's blue fairy godmother, fourteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst (Interview with the Vampire) in an astonishingly assured if fleeting performance, complete with note-perfect German accent, as Helga's lovesick younger sister Resi, and Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine) as Campbell's postwar New York City neighbor George Kraft, who admits Campbell into:
The Brotherhood of the Walking Wounded. It's the largest organization in the world. You don't even know it exists until you're in it. You get your membership card when you lose the one thing that gives your life any meaning, the thing that binds you together. The thing that holds the group in one piece is the fact that the members are absolutely incapable of speaking to one another.
Mother Night is neither cheerful nor uplifting, yet it is captivating, complicated, and deeply humane to all its characters. How it entirely escaped critical and award notice, and remains unknown today, is beyond me.