There was something a bit unsettling about seeing Hollywood’s George Clooney in White City’s Westfield on an otherwise ordinary recent weekday evening. There he was in an artfully dishevelled suit, no tie, stubble just so, making wise-cracks across the rows of seats at the Vue Cinema, an escalator-ride away from Nando’s, while his wife Amal, in a jewel-encrusted cocktail dress and vertiginous heels, held the crook of his arm and smiled.
There was something a bit unsettling about bedding down to watch his new adaptation of Catch-22 – Joseph Heller’s famously unfilmable 1961 novel (though Mike Nichols made a valiant attempt in 1970) about death, sex, boredom and bureaucratic insanity at an American airbase in Italy during the tail-end of World War II – which he has turned into a six-part mini-series that will be broadcast on Channel 4 from next week. With the charisma-bomb that had just exploded in West London on an ordinary Wednesday night, could anyone expect to watch it with their critical faculties intact?
Given these incredibly challenging circumstances – I mean, we could hear him laughing in the back row! – do reserve a little judgement when we report that Clooney’s Catch-22 is really rather good. His version, of which the first and the last episodes were screened (I know! What were they thinking?! Oh wait, it’s George. All cool), actually comes quite close to capturing Heller’s maniacal juxtaposition of bleakly zany humour and flat black fact.
Catch-22 centres on Captain John Yossarian, a bombardier stationed on the fictional island of Pianosa, trying to extricate himself from service by either completing an ever-increasing number of statutory missions or by asking to be signed off as insane, a request that is an inherent display of sanity – because only a sane person would ask not to fight – and fitness for service. (This is the Catch-22 of the title, as the base’s Doc Daneeka explains. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” says Yossarian, admiringly. “The best there is,” replies the doctor.)
Both the book and the mini-series, which was adapted by writer Luke Davies (Candy) and fellow Australian writer/director David Michôd (Animal Kingdom, The Rover) follow Yossarian – played with wonderful understatement and comic timing by sad-eyed American actor Christopher Abbott (Girls, The Sinner) – as he grinds out his months of duty, watching, mostly with dispassion, as his friends are picked off by the enemy or happenstance, and resigning himself to the ever-baffling bureaucratic machinations of the US Air Force.
Because it is the US Air Force that proves the biggest threat to Yossarian, both to his life and his sanity, with its mind-bendingly nonsensical edicts, of which Catch-22 is just the start, doled out by a bunch of madmen, simpletons and sadists in epaulettes and shiny shoes. Michôd has streamlined the book’s sprawling chain of command so that Yossarian’s principal opponents are Major – de Coverley, Colonel Cathcart and Lieutenant Scheisskopf, roles which Clooney having no trouble filling with Hugh Laurie, Kyle Chandler, and – oops! – himself.
It’s easy to see why Clooney was attracted to the role of the deranged and furious Scheisskopf – a surname which Clooney gleefully translated for the Westfield audience – but here, perhaps, his charm gets the better of him. His Scheisskopf is too silly, too clownish, with Clooney in full bug-eyed O Brother mode, to be scary (Clooney’s co-executive producer and co-director Grant Heslov, however, proves a revelation in his turn as Doc Daneeka; you’d think he was a long-lost Marx Brother).
In fact if there is a criticism to be made of the series generally it is that it is more comfortable in the humorous registers than in the sombre, where it sometimes relies too heavily on the score to do the work. (The book also contains a particularly harrowing rape and murder which wasn’t in the episodes shown.) It’s possible that this adaptation – with all its sun-kissed torsos, sparkling Italian waves, and quippy one-liners brings a warmth to Heller’s book which isn’t really in there at all, but ach, it’s George. Who’s complaining.
Catch-22 starts on Channel 4 at 9pm on Thursday 20 June
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
