When a didactic scene (“exposition dump”) doesn’t seem like one at all (videos): Mother Night (1996): “Blue Fairy Godmother”; John Goodman and Nick Nolte; and the official trailer

By N.S.

Kurt Vonnegut understood the German romantic spirit better than German literature professors I crossed paths with.

Although the surreal, comic story Slaughterhouse Five (1969) was his most famous novel, and surely sold much better, Mother Night (1961) (from a phrase by Goethe) was Vonnegut’s masterpiece. And the movie adaptation was the most faithful I’ve ever seen of any story.

And this scene is perhaps the greatest didactic scene (aka “exposition dump,” as a youtube commenter put it) I’ve ever seen. Such a scene is usually a low point in a movie, and yet here, in the hands of John Goodman and Nick Nolte, it’s amazing.

And yet it breaks my heart. John Goodman is one of the greatest talents ever, and yet his talents have been so rarely exploited, as they are here.

Mother Night’s fictional protagonist, Howard W. Campbell (Nolte), became a hero through committing treason, and only three men knew the truth: Campbell, Major Frank Wirtanen (Goodman), the intelligence officer who recruited him, and a man who died on April 12, 1945.

Campbell (Nolte), is either a traitor or America’s greatest spy. A successful, American-born playwright raised in Germany, Campbell is unofficially recruited by an American intelligence major to spew Nazi venom on the radio. But unlike Tokyo Rose or Ezra Pound, Campbell works for us.

The propaganda speeches Campbell read aloud were written by someone else, and contained coded messages to the Allies.

Campbell and his German actress wife, Helga (Sheryl Lee), are romantics who feel allegiance only to their “Reich der Zwei,” a nation (really, empire) of two. But their “nation” cannot survive Nazism and total war. Kurt Vonnegut perfectly captures the extremes of the German psyche: The boundless romanticism that would die for love, and the spiritual “inner emigration” from a mad world, which one outwardly obeys.

Escaping prosecution at war’s end, Campbell loses himself in Greenwich Village. Following his discovery on a fluke, a series of strange visitors land on his doorstep: Old Nazis; the “black Führer of Harlem”; paunchy veterans seeking revenge; his beloved Helga, long-believed dead; and Soviet and Israeli agents.

During The War, Vonnegut was a POW who survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker—Slaughterhouse Five. Later, he sought to make sense of the madness through surrealism, yet without abandoning his humanity, unlike today’s bloodless “postmodernist” writers (I originally wrote this in 1996). Like George Orwell’s 1984, Mother Night depicts a last lunge at love in a world in which gestures have lost all meaning. Sheryl Lee (who was born and raised in Augsburg, Bavaria, West Germany, and thus speaks with a perfect German accent) is heartbreaking, as the embodiment of boundless love.

(Sheryl Lee became famous playing the corpse that was shown at the beginning of each episode of David Lynch’s tv miniseries, Twin Peaks in 1989-91.)

Keith Gordon, who wrote the script and directed, was a nobody at the time. When Nolte’s agent blew him off, Gordon got a gig as an extra on a production Nolte was starring in, and went to the job carrying a concealed weapon—the script. He was able to get Nolte to read the script, and he was hooked.

Mother Night bombed, but it ranks #93rd on my list of the 100 Greatest Masterpieces.

Back then, the Oscars still mattered (the 1990s were the last great decade), and it should have been up for at least seven little men: Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin), Actress or Supporting Actress (Lee) and Editing.

Vonnegut leaves no doubt as to the moral of his story: You become the person you impersonate. “You must be careful what you pretend to be, because in the end, you are what you pretend to be.”

I beg to differ. And it also does not showcase Nolte’s greatest performance.

He starred in two Top 100 pictures; the other is The Prince of Tides (1991), #90. But his greatest performance was as existential Marine Ray Hicks, in Karel Reisz’ Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978), which was based on Robert Stone’s 1974 novel, Dog Soldiers. (Reisz’ picture was actually superior to Stone’s book, which was too Nietszchean.)

And yet, I still love this movie to death.

The only picture that has made my Top 100 list since Mother Night is Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.


“My Blue Fairy Godmother”




Mother Night: Official Trailer