War is a what-the-hell rabbit hole of twisted logic and arbitrary fate in Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s subversive 1961 novel of World War II lunacy. With vividly unsettling and graphically dark whimsy, executive producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov (who each appear in significant roles) adapt this classic in a new six-hour mini-series that sharply captures the appropriately cynical tone of broad satire, interrupted by the sheer terror of airborne combat. You’ll scream with laughter until, like its antihero, you’ll just scream. Our eyes and ears (and tortured psyche) in this picaresque odyssey is literature’s most reluctant warrior, John Yossarian (a marvelously wry Christopher Abbott in a star-making performance). A bombardier who tempts death every time he climbs into the nose of his aircraft to release his explosive payload, he’s shaken by the realization that “the enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.” Which means that his most immediate adversaries are the blowhard officers who keep raising the amount of missions he must complete before his harrowing tour of duty is over. Yossarian’s increasingly desperate schemes to thwart his superiors, carried out as casualties mount among his fellow airmen, constitute the basic plot. But what’s most memorable about this version of Catch-22 is its savagely funny-until-it’s-not depiction of war’s inherent insanity. Before there was M*A*S*H and the irreverent Hawkeye Pierce, Yossarian set the standard for naked — quite literally — antiauthoritarian attitude. The scene in which droll Doc Daneeka (Heslov) cheerfully explains to him the title conundrum — you’re crazy to want to fly more missions, but if you don’t want to, you’re sane and you have to fly them — is devastating in its circular hopelessness. And while Clooney (Lieutenant, later General, Scheisskopf) and Kyle Chandler (Colonel Cathcart) are hilarious as the most pompous and blustery of Yossarian’s foes, the danger they represent with their fatuous, implacable zealotry is nothing to laugh at. Even the comic interludes, including a country-hopping trip through the black market with profiteering Lt. Milo Minderbinder (Daniel David Stewart), leave a sour edge, as Yossarian discovers that in war, there’s no such thing as peace of mind. Catch-22, Series Premiere, Friday, May 17, Hulu<doc-sep>Joseph Heller’s blackly satirical “Catch-22” was in many ways a reaction—to the author’s experiences in World War II; to the knee-jerk glorification of warfare and uniforms; to the state of the novel itself. And, as he once explained, he was trying to answer a question: “What does a sane man do in an insane society?” Catch-22 Friday, Hulu In others words, he had his reasons. Less evident are the motives behind Hulu’s new, six-part version of “Catch-22,” episodes of which are directed by George Clooney, Grant Heslov and Ellen Kuras (who are also among the executive producers). The timing is apt enough: Authoritarian rule is flourishing around the globe; “Catch-22” questions authority at every turn. It is antiwar. It is antibureaucratic. It is unavoidably political, especially now. But you wonder, at the end, if there’s been a payoff. It is ultimately one of the existentially bleaker experiences your TV has to offer this season, making “Les Misérables” over on PBS seem like “Two Broke Girls,” and gravitating at every opportunity toward the existential dread contained in what has proved to be an unfilmable novel. In 1970, Mike Nichols chose to make a “Catch-22” that mined the wacky absurdist comedy in Heller’s anarchic Italian theater of bombing missions, craven military incompetence and mental imbalance. It didn’t work. The new version doesn’t work either. But at least it’s for intriguingly different reasons. Christopher Abbott as Yossarian Photo: Hulu John Yossarian ( Christopher Abbott ), a bombardier like Heller and the author’s ostensible hero, wants out of the war and has decided, quite rightly, that his enemy is anyone who’s trying to kill him, including his commanding officers: Gen. Scheisskopf (Mr. Clooney), whose wife ( Julie Ann Emery ) has been sleeping with Yossarian; the cadaverous Lt. Col. Korn ( Kevin J. O’Connor ), who always sees the political advantage in doing the wrong thing; and Col. Cathcart ( Kyle Chandler ), the commander of Yossarian’s air base at Pianosa, who keeps raising the number of missions a flier needs to complete his service, thus creating Yossarian’s Kafkaesque nightmare. (I know, but Heller actually was influenced by Kafka.) Blustering and thick, Cathcart, well-played by Mr. Chandler, is a character on whom Stanley Kubrick might have modeled Buck Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove.” (It’s no accident that episode 5 of this new “Catch-22” ends with “We’ll Meet Again,” the nuclear-holocaust theme song of “Strangelove,” delivered in the dulcet tones of Vera Lynn. ) The airmen surrounding Yossarian are a collection of the disturbed and psychopathic, but Yossarian—unlike, say, Randall P. McMurphy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”—is not quite simpatico with the semi-loonies who surround him. He’s a bit craven. A bit of a whiner. His determination to get out of active duty is so single-minded and all-consuming that he inadvertently causes the deaths of at least four of his fellow airmen. Hugh Laurie as Major De Coverley and Daniel David Stewart as Milo Photo: Hulu Does this mean that Yossarian really is crazy? It wouldn’t help if he were: Catch-22, as explained by Dr. Daneeka (Mr. Heslov), acknowledges that if an airman is insane enough to fly bombing missions over, say, Bologna or Avignon, then he’s too insane to fly. And in order to be excused, all he needs to do is ask. But if he asks, it shows an instinct for self-preservation that proves he isn’t crazy. Ergo, he still has to fly those missions. The writers of Hulu’s “Catch-22,” Luke Davies and David Michôd, pepper their screenplay with similarly paradoxical formulations, while shrugging off some of the obvious restraints, and virtues, of Heller’s book—the overlapping points of view; the nonlinear structure; the reprise of moments that reveal and illuminate earlier fragments of narrative. There is a sense of disconnection, but it exists between the overall visual conception of this “Catch-22” and the story being told: Scenes between actors are often funny and rich. And then the picture wanders off to find another human encounter, leaving dead air in its wake. George Clooney as Gen. Scheisskopf, Christopher Abbott as Yossarian and Pico Alexander as Clevinger Photo: Hulu The performances are almost uniformly—pun intended—good. Lewis Pullman, as the unfortunately named Major Major (who, of course, is promoted to major) is a nervous breakdown on legs; Giancarlo Giannini is world-weariness personified as the previously unnamed old man in the Roman brothel. Here he is named Marcello, which is a nice gesture—in the Nichols version, the part was played by another screen legend, Marcel Dalio (forever known as the croupier in “Casablanca”). Nately ( Austin Stowell ), who falls in love with one of Marcello’s housemates, makes his star-crossed character the quintessential wide-eyed American. Hugh Laurie, as Maj. De Coverley, passes through briefly, leaving the story largely undisturbed. Key to the entire production, though, is Milo Minderbinder, rendered an endearingly avaricious cutthroat by Daniel David Stewart. As the company mess officer, Milo spends as much time on the black market as he does feeding the men. He’s not just a profiteer but a globalist: He has no problem enlisting Nazi pilots to help him as he trades and transports Scotch and silk and tomatoes and goats, buying here, selling there and making everyone around him complicit by giving them shares in his “syndicate.” He has no national allegiances; Milo is a corporation. “War isn’t only about profits, Milo,” says a worried Cathcart. “Not only, sir,” answers Milo, enthusiastically. While the performances can be both comic and moving, the actors are mostly playing types—there’s a sense of Central Casting to the characterizations, which may be the intent of directors Clooney, Heslov and Kuras, or their writers: a show set in the ’40s that reflects a ’40s sensibility. This may also be giving them the benefit of the doubt, because ’40s movies generally moved with the kind of momentum that would have propelled Yossarian out of Italy, out of Europe, across the Atlantic and back to whatever American city he’s so ruthlessly trying to reach. Ultimately, the viewer won’t be overly concerned about whether he gets there or not. —Dorothy Rabinowitz is on vacation.<doc-sep>
Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 is one of the greatest anti-war satires ever written. With their six-part Hulu miniseries adaptation, George Clooney and Grant Heslov have nailed the anti-war part. The satire? Well, that’s the catch. Clooney and Heslov executive-produced this new version, with each directing a pair of episodes (Ellen Kuras handled the other two) from scripts by Luke Davies and David Michôd. Their depiction of World War II’s Mediterranean theater, as seen through the eyes of American bombardier John Yossarian (Christopher Abbott from Girls), is handsome and appropriately shocking. As Yossarian risks his life on one pointless bombing run after another, the direction, the cinematography (by Martin Ruhe) and the digital effects make the flights both clear and unnerving. Each mission offers some stunning new horror that will spur Yossarian in his quest to be grounded by any means necessary. Memorable moments from the novel, such as Yossarian’s midair conversation with a wounded new addition to the crew, are a gut punch. Had this creative team set out to make a straightforward drama about all the atrocities and tragedies of even a “good” war, they likely would have done a strong job. But Clooney and Co. instead attempted to adapt a famously funny book in which Yossarian’s ordeal is not just nightmare but farce. And virtually all of the miniseries’ attempts at comedy land with all the delicacy of one of Yossarian’s aerial payloads. Take, for instance, the character of Major Major Major Major (Lewis Pullman). On the page, it’s slyly funny that he’s promoted to that rank because of the repeating name his prankster father gave him. But Davies and Michôd have him continually pause to explain the joke at length, each time beginning, “It’s a funny story.” Not with that much exposition, it’s not. Or consider the contradictory military order that gives the book and miniseries a title. As base physician Doc Daneeka puts it, any crew member can be grounded for being insane, but only if they ask to be — an act of self-preservation that would render them clearly sane in the eyes of the military. In the book, the exchange where Daneeka lays this out for Yossarian is as ridiculously rat-a-tat as anything from the Marx Brothers or Abbott and Costello. But Heslov casts himself as Daneeka, and he lacks both the verbal dexterity and the flair for playing absurdity to pull it off. And Abbott, who’s good in the dramatic scenes, often seems puzzled whenever a joke is being delivered, as uncertain of what he’s doing there as Yossarian is. Of the sprawling cast, only a handful of actors even consistently seem to be aware that they’re in a comedy (albeit a very dark one). Clooney goes into full Coen-brothers-goon mode as the martinet parade officer Scheisskopf. Kyle Chandler effectively tweaks his own ramrod image as the sadistically insecure Colonel Cathcart, and there’s a bounce to Daniel David Stewart’s work as Milo Minderbinder, the hustler who quickly figures out how to use his job as mess officer to launch a profitable multinational syndicate. But too many others are playing things straight, or simply haven’t been given anything to play. The great Hugh Laurie, whose gifts for comedy and drama should make him a natural for a project like this, is utterly wasted as Major de Coverley. The soundtrack is peppered with uptempo big-band hits including “No Love No Nothin’,” by Rosemary Clooney (aunt of George), and “Massachusetts,” by Anita O’Day. These are meant to be ironic counterpoints to Yossarian’s grim missions, but they often feel like an inadvertent critique of the story they’re accompanying. The songs, even the ballads, have rhythm and forward momentum that Catch-22 consistently lacks. The humor stumbles when it should swing. Catch-22 premieres May 17th on Hulu. I’ve seen all six episodes.