Catch-22
This is a tricky one. Is this miniseries well-made? Absolutely. Every aspect is top-notch. Is it the story from Joseph Heller’s novel? Pretty much. But is it Catch-22? No.
The series is fully realized and works as is, but it kind of distorts all that is great about the novel. A true masterpiece in every way, Heller’s novel is hilarious, genre-bending, fecund, harrowing, mutative… So much is missing from this adaptation. Mike Nichols made a much better version in just two hours. While a novel this complex and lengthy deserves the miniseries treatment, this miniseries doesn’t steward that extra runtime well at all.
A huge factor in this is the terrible choice to iron out Heller’s Gordian knot into a linear war drama. So so much is lost through this chronological ordering of the plot, most tragically the character of Yossarian himself. In this version, instead of living inside his fractured memory, we just proceed from point A to point B. In the process, he becomes almost a villain. Every tragedy in the series can be traced back to Yossarian. His cowardice and selfishness become his defining traits. The facts remain mostly the same, but their conventional presentation here keeps us outside of the true Hell in Yossarian’s mind.
The incident with Snowden becomes simply a climactic set piece instead of the bleeding center of the hemorrhagic story. Many have praised the depiction of Nurse Duckett, but I found her diminished from the woman in the book into a token female Jiminy Cricket.
All the elbow room a five-hour runtime provides should broaden the scope. We should see more incidents and characters from the novel. The officers’ pet obsessions should be heaped a mile high. We should see the dark deal Yossarian makes to become an officer in much more depth. His Dantean walk through Rome (the book’s tour-de-force section) should be more fully represented, not less. Above all, the inanity of the Catch-22 should be the recurring brick wall it is in the novel. Instead, it’s a brief conversation. What about the doctor’s “death”? What—for crying out loud—about the Chaplain?! He’s a major character, the first we meet in the book. The Man in White? The knife fight? Even Major Major is a one-joke contrivance here.
The best elements of the series are the era-specific soundtrack and the scenes of the bombing raids. It is hard to imagine the layout of the plane from Heller’s prose, and this gave me an instant upgrade in understanding. The flak is menacing…but oddly uniform and constant. The performances are good, especially Christopher Abbott’s Yossarian and Kyle Chandler’s Cathcart (but where is his fixation on bombing patterns?).
This miniseries seldom manages to be really funny, which makes it just one more anti-war project. Catch-22 is about so much more! And it is the funniest novel I’ve ever read! No one mentions Orr’s record of crash landings or its big payoff—which, subsequently leaves Yossarian’s story unfinished. All of these things are reduced to quick mentions—I suppose they’re supposed to be “Easter eggs”—but the heavy contraption just can’t fly that way.
Finally, to show that the miniseries has indeed misrepresented the book: the parental warnings mention the “lack of diversity among the almost all-male cast” but give the series a pass on capitalist propaganda. There is literally a category called “capitalism”, and it says “not present”. And that is all the proof you should need that this adaptation failed its source material (not to mention M&M Enterprises).