Breakfast of Champions

Midland City is a perfectly ordinary American city. Within the confines of this small world, dealership owner Dwayne Hoover is a celebrity despite the fact that his wealth and success has only served to make him more and more unstable and unhappy. His wife is suicidal and his secretary offers limited relief in their affair. Not that many others have it better. Harry Le Sabre is his sales manager and is full of guilt over his cross dressing and active sex life. With this community breaking down, small time porno-mag article contributor Kilgore Trout makes his way to the city to take his place as the guest of honour at the arts fest – not quite sure how anyone has heard of him.

Another commentator on this site has said that if you showed this film to ten people then probably eight would hate it; those praising it have claimed it to be a wonderful version of Vonnegut's novel. Not having read this, I can believe that he (and this) is an acquired taste because I found it to be an almost unbearably messy affair that was delivered in a silly manner that offered little of interest. Indeed for much of the film I wasn't sure what to make of it. Perhaps it tried to do too much but there seemed to be so many characters rammed in here that most of them just seemed out of place and with no development whatsoever. Of course it didn't help that I didn't see much about those given plenty of time either. Dwayne himself is the perfect example of this; his madness seems to have a reason but the film does a terrible job in bringing this out.

Rudolph seems passionate in his direction but it seems he is too close to the material and his direction might assume a familiarisation with the material that the mass audience will not have. The delivery is too silly and knowingly manic – it takes away from the material and it left me feeling like perhaps it was my fault for not having read the story before watching it. It annoyed me as well that such a starry cast were mostly wasted – presumably they saw something in the material that did not make it to the screen. Willis tries hard but is not supported at all. Finney spends most of the time in his own film, not really fitting into the narrative. Nolte is amusing; Hershey is wasted; Epps has been told something by the director that the rest of us aren't let into. Patton, Wilson, Haas, Lewis and others provide thankless supports.

This may well be perfect for fans of Vonnegut, I cannot say but suffice to say that I am not one of them. However for the casual viewer this is messy, disjointed and pointless to the point of being painful. I gave it two hours as I tried to work it out, hoping that it would make something out of itself but in the end I was left out of pocket with nothing to show for my investment.

I'm a fan of both Kurt Vonnegut and Alan Rudolph (especially Alan Rudolph), but I was just appalled when I saw this film. The only redeeming feature is Bruce Willis's performance. Other than that, it's a real mess. What was Rudolph thinking?!

After a recent Vonnegut reading binge I was eager to see Breakfast of Champions when I saw it on the video shelf. A great cast, a director (Aland Rudolph) who has made several films I've enjoyed (Choose Me, The Moderns, Trouble in Mind). Sadly, BofC is quite a disappointment.

Two things really stick out for me. Although Bruce Willis was quite good as Dwayne Hoover, too many of the other characters, notably Harry LeSabre (Nick Nolte) and Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps) are portrayed in frenetic over the top performances. OK...we get it that there are all sorts of crazies running amuck in Midland City, but the point Vonnegut was making in his novel was that this madness is displayed in the "normal" everyday way that we live our lives in America. The values (consumerism, greed, violence) and actions that are considered normal in the United States are themselves proof that we are all suffering from a form of madness...showing these fine actors jumping around and uttering indecipherable gibberish shows only that they are annoying.

The film also has a problem in creating a consistent point of view. In the novel the author guides us through Dwayne Hoovers' unfolding madness and is actually a character in the book. The movie can't give us the background information the books' narrator did and I would guess that anyone who hasn't read the book will find the movie tough going...perhaps downright incomprehensible.

Lastly, as a great fan of Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut fans know him as a character who pops up in several Vonnegut novels) I thought Albert Finney did quite a nice job; he had just the right air of unkempt, curmudgeonly, insane genius that makes Trout my favorite Vonnegut character of all time. Still, it's hardly enough to save this mess...I admire the effort in bringing Breakfast of Champions to the screen, but in the end it's likely that this is an unfilmable novel.

Yes,"Breakfast Of Champions" is a brilliant original literary work by Kurt Vonnegut.No,the film adaptation does not do justice to the multi-layered masterpiece.Sure,maybe Robert Altman,Terry Gilliam,or David Lynch might have made better versions of it than Alan Rudolph.But a 4.1?When derivative pieces like "Disturbia",or mindless action films(I could name 50)are scoring 6's and 7's on IMDb,something is seriously out of whack.The performances alone in Breakfast are worth the price of admission,and it's got some quirky,twisted little comic moments in it.Maybe it didn't quite capture the profundity of the book like Slaughterhouse Five did,but c'mon,let's get real here.I think that maybe hardcore cult film afficianados thought it was too commercial(or something?),and the general audience out there didn't really give a rat's ass either way,so I guess that explains the 4.1.I'm giving it a well-deserved 6.Thanks.

Though it's bound for negative comparison with the sober, Joe Pro, Oscar-friendly AMERICAN BEAUTY, I vastly preferred Alan Rudolph's vision of suburban life gone bonkers. His adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's best (and most scabrous) novel starts with one genius style choice: Rudolph mates the Pop Art Expressionism of Oliver Stone with the group-hug ensemble of his mentor, Robert Altman. Beneath the blizzard of smily-face pins, digital-display Colonel Sanders, and chain-diner Muzak lies a Tiffany cast. Bruce Willis is the face of desperation under a stick-on grin as the car-salesman hero, Dwayne Hoover, a small-town hero who doesn't know why he's a few cards short of a full deck. As his second banana, Nick Nolte is a dream as a hard-working joe who's so guilty about his sexual kinks they seem to leak out of him like flopsweat. And as the movie's resident seer and soothsayer--a derelict sci-fi genius named Kilgore Trout--Albert Finney is so perfect Rudolph seems to have plucked him from out of an Iowa City dumpster.

Rudolph's attempts at stars-and-stripes Expressionism don't all work; some uncharitable folks will be reminded of late-sixties I-hate-America bashes like END OF THE ROAD. But I have always had a soft spot for those pictures, and I feel protective toward BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS as well. Blessings are showered upon Bruce Willis for scratching this dark-horse project out of thin air, and upon Rudolph too. He must have known that propelling himself out of his usual world of downbeat, canoodling romanticism would pull out of him the best work of his career.