It Keeps Coming Back

Rating: 8/10 (21 September 2001)

I don't know why it is. I read the book about 5 times. It was one of those rites of passage in my youth, founded in the sixties. When the movie was going to be made, I thought, "Oh, Lord!" I didn't have to see it. I was disappointed in it before I went to it. I believe I was perceptive enough to know that there is no movie director on earth who could do justice to the book. It would be a failure. In most ways it was, at least in my eyes. The thing is, though, that every time it shows up on TV or I find my old VHS copy sitting worn on the back of a bookshelf, I can't take my eyes off it. The surreal meandering, the craziness of the signature title, are presented well enough to hang on to my reluctant attention. I think one of the things I love is Alan Arkin's expressions of pain. When he opens his parachute to find an M & M Enterprises coupon, it is laughable: "We're going back. We're going to turn the plane around and go back." Then the same thing becomes ugly when he looks for the morphine to help Snowden in his dying state and the same thing happens. The characters are well drawn and the acting is excellent. Every scene is a Catch-22, piled up one after the other. Meanwhile, Yossarian is dreaming and yearning and afraid to die. It's the cohesion that's missing; it's some of the really significant characters that give the insane order to the book. Still, next chance I get, I will watch it again, because, as the Doc would say after Yossarian says, "That's some catch that catch 22." "Yep, it's the best there is." For now, this is the best there is, and it will do until some other poor soul tries to do it again.