Review – Mother Night

I’ve never read the source novel by Kurt Vonnegut, but there’s just something about this production that makes me suspect it was a better book than it was a movie. Nick Nolte stars as an American expatriate playwright living in Hitler’s Germany. An OSS agent (John Goodman) recruits him to pretend to be a Nazi sympathizer so he can use a propaganda radio broadcast to sneak messages to Allied intelligence. And of course because the whole thing is a big secret, after the war he’s treated like an actual traitor. Trying to live anonymously in New York City, he ends up befriended by neo-fascists, “reunited” with a woman he thinks is his dead wife, and ultimately seized by the Mossad. In other words, it’s Vonnegut’s usual brand of semi-absurdist, semi-nihilist humor. It just doesn’t quite work in movie form. Mildly amusing