Lost in Space

By JAY COCKS

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

Directed by GEORGE ROY HILL Screenplay by STEPHEN GELLER

Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) is an innocent, and this Pilgrim's Progress is a capricious pirouette down the corridors of time. Slaughterhouse-Five was Kurt Vonnegut's most widely popular novel, an attempt to impose comic order onto moral chaos. But it has been adapted here with undue reverence. The movie cuts from World War II, where Pilgrim is a P.O.W. during the fire-bombing of Dresden, through his model suburbanite's life in Ilium, N.Y., to an improbable future on the planet of Tralfamadore, where he is doomed to pass eternity with a molestable movie star named Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine). In its elaborate structure and editing, its leaping bounds between fact and fancy, the film is like a version of Last Year in Marienbad revised for showing on Sesame Street.

As in Vonnegut, liberal quantities of whimsy are poured through the plot like so many doses of barium. The viewer is supposed to have a sense of the spiritual crisis brought on by Billy's experience in the Dresden bombing. Having found solace with Montana, he announces, "If we're going to survive, it's necessary to concentrate on the good moments and forget the bad." Shortly afterward, his baby is born, the universe rejoices, the firmament lights up with fireworks. As a resolution of plot and a reconciliation of historical horror, this amounts to a cosmic lollipop.

As directed by George Roy Hill, the film is alternately flashy and mean spirited. In one scene the audience is invited to have a few laughs over the blubbering anxiety of Billy's wife (Sharon Gans) as she races recklessly to visit him in the hospital. Valerie Perrine is charming, sensual and funny as Mon tana, and Ron Leibman and Eugene Roche struggle valiantly to pump life into the roles of Billy's fellow prisoners. Michael Sacks, in his first screen performance, seems desperately in need of vocational guidance.

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