Breakfast of Champions (film)

Breakfast of Champions
US DVD cover
Directed by	Alan Rudolph
Screenplay by	Alan Rudolph
Based on	Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Produced by	David Blocker David Willis
Starring	Bruce Willis Albert Finney Nick Nolte Barbara Hershey Glenne Headly Lukas Haas Omar Epps Vicki Lewis Buck Henry Ken Campbell Jake Johannsen
Cinematography	Elliot Davis
Edited by	Suzy Elmiger
Music by	Mark Isham
Production companies	Hollywood Pictures Summit Entertainment
Distributed by	Buena Vista Pictures Distribution[1]
Release date	September 17, 1999 (1999-09-17)
Running time	110 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$12 million[2]
Box office	$178,278[2]

Breakfast of Champions is a 1999 American satirical black comedy film adapted and directed by Alan Rudolph, from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s 1973 novel of the same name. Though the producers entered it into the 49th Berlin International Film Festival,^[3] the film was negatively received by critics and was a box office bomb that was withdrawn from theatres before going into wide release. While it has been released on VHS and DVD, it has not yet been given a digital release.

Plot

Dwayne Hoover, a car salesman who is the most respected businessman in Midland City, Indiana, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even attempting suicide daily. His wife, Celia, is addicted to pills, and his sales manager and best friend, Harry Le Sabre, is preoccupied with his own secret fondness for wearing lingerie, worried he will be discovered.

Meanwhile, a little-known science fiction author, Kilgore Trout, is hitchhiking across the United States to speak at Midland City's arts festival. In search of answers for his identity quest, Hoover decides to attend the festival.

Cast

Production

Lukas Haas makes a cameo as Bunny, Dwayne's son, who, in the novel, plays piano in the lounge at the Holiday Inn. For legal reasons, in the film Bunny instead plays at the AmeriTel Inn.^{[citation needed]}

The film's soundtrack predominantly features the exotica recordings of Martin Denny to tie in with Hoover's Hawaiian-based sales promotion.

Much of the film was shot in and around Twin Falls, Idaho.^[4] Kurt Vonnegut makes a one-line cameo as a TV commercial director.^[5]

Reception

Box office

The film made $178,278 against a budget of $12 million.^[2]

Critical response

Breakfast of Champions received negative reviews, scoring a rating of 26% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 47 reviews, with an average score of 4.23/10. The consensus states: "The movie is overwhelmed by its chaotic visual effects and disjointed storyline."^[6] In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote "In many ways, Breakfast of Champions is an incoherent mess. But it never compromises its zany vision of the country as a demented junkyard wonderland in which we are all strangers groping for a hand to guide us through the looking glass into an unsullied tropical paradise of eternal bliss."^[7] Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "F" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Rudolph, in an act of insane folly, seems to think that what matters is the story. The result could almost be his version of a Robert Altman disaster — a movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it."^[8]

In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Stack wrote "Rudolph botches the material big time. Relying on lame visual gimmicks that fall flat, and insisting on pushing almost every scene as frantic comedy weighted by social commentary, he forces his actors to become hams rather than believable characters."^[9] Sight and Sound magazine's Edward Lawrenson wrote "Willis' performance, all madness, no method, soon feels embarrassingly indulgent."^[10] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote "As it is, Breakfast of Champions is too in-your-face, too heavily satirical in its look, and its ideas not as fresh as they should be. For the film to have grabbed us from the start, Rudolph needed to make a sharper differentiation between the everyday world his people live in and the vivid world of their tormented imaginations."^[11]

In her review for The Village Voice, Amy Taubin wrote "Another middle-aged male-crisis opus, it begins on a note of total migraine-inducing hysteria, which continues unabated throughout."^[12] The French filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet, on the other hand, regarded it as one of the great films of the 1990s.^[13]

Vonnegut's reaction

At the close of the Harper audiobook edition of Breakfast of Champions, there is a brief conversation between Vonnegut and his long-time friend and attorney Donald C. Farber, in which the two, among making jokes, disparage this loose film adaptation of the book as "painful to watch."^[14]

See also

• Cross-dressing in film and television

References

External links

• Breakfast of Champions at IMDb
• Breakfast of Champions at Rotten Tomatoes
• Breakfast of Champions at AllMovie
• Breakfast of Champions at Box Office Mojo

This page was last edited on 30 March 2024, at 00:27