What ?!?

Rating: 3/10 (3 August 2016)

I suspect that if Robert Altman's ground breaking M.A.S.H. had not come out the same year, Catch-22 might have lived on as the Vietnam era satirical anti-war film. I'm glad M.A.S.H. did come along because this film was dribble. I think Mike Nichols ego got the better of him, having come off two hits (Graduate and ...Virginia Woolf), and the film suffers for this. He took a seminal postmodern work and destroyed it, the viewer forced to watch this disaster at twenty four frames a second.
All Nichols had to do was pull a John Houston. For years many filmmakers tried to make the Maltese Falcon, but they deviated from the novel, and the films were awful. Nichols just needed to put the book in script form, and then chop off some of the fat in the editing room. Instead we are forced to watch this mangled train wreck. There are a few good moments, the Snowden scene cut up and running through the film was a very nice touch. The casting was good for the most part, but we didn't have enough time with each character to really get to know them, to care about them, to hate them.
Believing Art Garfunkel as Natley the rich New Englander is beyond the talent and abilities of Mr. Garfunkel, and insulting to actors and New Englanders everywhere. Jon Voight was absolutely wrong for Milo, the whimsical pseudo-communist capitalist running an empire of trades and deals. The role demanded someone with a bit of the shady New York about him, not Mid-western Nordicism. So many little tidbits are missing, and Catch-22 is story about little tidbits, little stories that all weave together to form a rich tapestry of life. Major Major Major Major came and went like a flash, no mention of Washington Irving. I was hoping that they could have cast Peter Fonda, and played up the Henry Fonda resemblance more. Nor a hint of the CID men who came to interview him.
One of the most critical, and humorous scenes in the novel is the interrogation of Clevinger. It was one of the funniest things I've read in a novel, and it surmises the absurdity of the chain of command, and war in general. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for this pivotal scene that never came. General Scheisskopf is also absent, along with his parades, and masochistic wife. I saw Doc Daneeka as the guy who tells really dirty jokes when no one is looking, an edge to the man, a cunningness, a shifty opportunistic abortionist, and as good as Jack Gilford is, he's not that guy. The list continues on and on. Arkin was somewhat of a saving grace for this picture; he was cast accordingly, and did the best he could amongst the visceral carnage laid out on celluloid.
The subtle allegories to heaven were also a little hackneyed. True one reading from this novel that some of it happened in a death dream state, a blur between life, death, reality and unreality. It would have come off much stronger to play it straight, Bea Arthur straight, and punched the jokes in strong. It's the contrast of order versus dis-order that make Catch-22 so endearing. That military men act illogically in logical situations, and logically in illogical situations. When translating a dialogue rich novel such as Catch-22, it's usually best to stick with the story in the novel. It would be wonderful is someone down the road dusted off a copy of this fine work of post war literature, wrote it out in script form, and shot it. The whimsical, satirical, nonsensical, non-linear structure might play better with cinema trappings of early 21st century cinema; Post- Tarantino, Chapter 1, The Texan, and so forth. Until then we're left with this dud.