Flying high but unable to take in anything but his own misery, he’s just over it.Ī little ironic counterpoint, though, can go a long way. He’s not angry or upset at his circumstance. Abbott is at his best in scenes that contrast the doings of war - aerial missions that might elsewhere seem not merely heroic but outright glamorous - with his own beleaguered blankness. His fellow conscripts are benignly accepting of their ever-rising mission count, even eager to fly, but increasingly apocalyptic in their pursuit of off-hours fun our hero views continued missions as an emergency from which he needs to escape and thus has no need to obliterate himself when the flying’s done. The mass sometimes looks like Rafi Gavron and sometimes like Austin Stowell but never like Abbott. They eventually coagulate into a mass of grumbling compliance. The rest of the battalion are well cast to achieve an ambient sameness. Afforded the opportunity to introduce some shading, Clooney and his fellow directors (Ellen Kuras and longtime Clooney collaborator Grant Heslov each helmed two apiece) cleverly set Yossarian apart from his fellow enlisted men. The novel’s Yossarian speaks in the same tones as everyone around him - brutish, yet inflected with lofty philosophy. And Abbott is more convincing as a character openly disgusted by his cohort’s abuse of women than the Yossarian of the novel, both because this adaptation cleans up Yossarian’s behavior and because Abbott brings a special sensitivity invisible on the page.
This Yossarian knows he shouldn’t bother trying to effect change. A crucial scene of senseless violence at the series’ exact midpoint features Yossarian staring in mournful disbelief, while in the novel he futilely tries to prevent the cataclysm. This Yossarian is more worn and more broken than Heller’s. His lingering macho affect is the last glimmer of a brashness that, we can tell, was already beaten out of him before the story began. The vocal affectation, which he slightly modifies for “Catch-22,” is telling - Abbott, like many actors of his generation, exists within the sphere of Ryan Gosling’s influence. The actor is preceded by a helpful bit of persona: He came to prominence in a fine supporting performance on “Girls” before quitting the show abruptly, then returning seasons later with a tough-guy outer-borough accent. Abbott deserves special mention for cracking Yossarian. Yet the series, in thrall to and in the shadow of one of the most sharply written novels of its era, never finds a way to live on its own. It elides some of the worst of the novel’s degradation of women, streamlines as best it can the most verbose of the vignettes and builds out Yossarian - played by Christopher Abbott in a performance that announces the leading-man arrival of a long-simmering talent - into a character whose angst we feel.
#CATCH 22 HULU SERIES#
The new series works better than it should.
#CATCH 22 HULU TV#
But if only TV could make “Catch-22,” perhaps only TV would be foolhardy enough to try.
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