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Breakfast Of Champions

1999, Movie, R, 110 mins

Breakfast Of Champions: Review

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
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Cross-dressing, extramarital affairs, pill-popping, insanity and suicidal despair lie beneath the surface of small town success in Alan Rudolph's adaptation of the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Successful Midland City used-car salesman Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis) is on the brink of utter collapse. His pill-addled wife (Barbara Hershey) speaks exclusively in TV ad slogans; his son (Lukas Haas) has transformed himself into a big haired, sequined jacketed lounge singer called "Bunny;" his oldest friend (Nick Nolte) wears women's underwear and his mistress (Glenne Headley) has turned into a cooing scold — even his dog hates him. Every morning he considers suicide, but can't go through with it. Meanwhile, failed sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney) is hitching his way to appear as guest of honor at rich eccentric Fred T. Barry's (Buck Henry) first-ever Midland City arts festival. Trout the visionary and Hoover the desperate seeker are destined to meet, with unanticipated results. Vonnegut's brand of juvenile surrealism, coarse anti-establishment posturing and puerile shock tactics doesn't age especially well (like science fiction, the golden age of Vonnegut is 12), but it could hardly be worse served than to be brought to the screen with such ham-fisted literal-mindedness. That's not to say that the movie doesn't play fast and loose with the book's events; only that it aims slavishly to preserve the pop absurdist tone. Vonnegut's targets are as legitimate as they were when Breakfast of Champions was first published in 1973 : blind capitalism, middle-class complacency, small-minded hypocrisy and philistinism of all stripes. But his tone is crude and obvious, and Rudolph's use of grotesque close-ups, boisterous parodies of inane TV fare and manic handling of his actors (who appear to have been directed to mug and contort themselves at every opportunity) do nothing to enrich the message. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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