![]() ![]() This constant flux between light and dark, farce and fatalism, is borne out in the miniseries’ stylistic elements. The second time, a much bloodier event that follows a jaunty sequence scored to Benny Goodman’s “Goodbye,” he seems to visibly fracture in front of the camera, as if you can watch his spirit degrading. The first time Yossarian registers the death of a fellow pilot, his face twitches almost imperceptibly. Initially, this distance feels alienating, but Abbott’s performance is so magnetic and so multidimensional that it’s hard not to be drawn in. As with the book, all we get of Yossarian is his presence, like he’s Sisyphus trapped in the underworld and bombs are his boulder. Catch-22, for all the time it spends looking at its protagonist, lingering over Abbott’s flaring nostrils and clenched jaw, gives little sense of who Yossarian actually is, or where he comes from, or what he wants, besides his immediate imperative of staying alive. This feeling of circular logic as a noose tightening around Yossarian’s neck, coupled with the frenetic energy of the first few episodes and the introduction of a fleet of supporting characters, can make it hard to get absorbed in the action early on. Desperate to stay alive, Yossarian consults the camp doctor (Grant Heslov), who tells him about the catch-22 that governs getting out of combat duty: Anyone who wants to fly is crazy enough to be grounded, but anyone who declares himself to be crazy is obviously sane enough to fly. Two months later, Yossarian is stationed in Pianosa, Italy, trying to complete a mission count that Colonel Cathcart (Kyle Chandler) keeps increasing every time the pilot gets close. He’s plagued by a puffed-up lieutenant obsessed with military parades (George Clooney), consoled by the lieutenant’s comely wife (Julie Ann Emery), and hopeful that World War II might be over by the time he actually encounters it. In the first episode, Yossarian is a bombardier completing his pilot training at the Santa Ana Army Air Base. Like Heller’s book, Catch-22 launches in the middle of things, although it reworks the nonlinear structure of the book into a more chronological framework. Its upside-down logic confronts you with the beauty of life and the monstrousness of a war whose only objective is to snuff that beauty out at every opportunity. But in the sense that a TV show can capture the spirit of something, Catch-22 is magical, maddening, tender, and caustic in equal measure. Catch-22 isn’t a perfect adaptation of Joseph Heller’s 1961 book of the same name-both because it’s a four-hour television drama instead of a 450-page novel and because perfectly adapting Heller’s satirical, tart narrative for the screen is probably impossible. The central character in Hulu’s new six-part miniseries Catch-22, Captain John Yossarian (played by Christopher Abbott), is nicknamed Yo-Yo, aptly so, since he spends the entirety of the story being yanked back and forth on a fragile cord between life and death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |