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Review

A wonderfully wry and unexpectedly romantic adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's 1974 novel, Mother Night marks another successful behind-the-camera turn for actor-turned-director Gordon. Using flashback to recall the life of an American double agent living in Nazi Germany, the story begins with Howard Campbell (Nolte) serving time in an Israeli prison. An outspoken Nazi sympathizer and playwright, Campbell was in fact a spy for the Allies who would use his weekly anti-Semitic and anti-American radio hour to convey encoded secret information. Traveling back and forth in time (much like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five), the film focuses on Campbell's post-war life as a desolate, lonely widower in New York whose name perversely comes before the public once more. All during the story, Vonnegut takes a moral dilemma and devours it, spitting out chunks of ambiguity and the bizarre with devilish delight.