is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Cloud Atlas, film version
I had purposefully not read any reviews of the Cloud Atlas movie, so as not to approach it with any expectations that were not my own. There were already plenty of those. It�s one of my favorite novels�I read it a number of years ago and then again last month. I�ve long thought it simply could not be adapted to film because of its complicated structure�six nested narratives taking place in different years and places, from 1849 (South Pacific), 1936 (England and Belgium), 1973 (San Francisco), 2012 (London), and 2144 (Korea) to 2431 (Hawaii). We begin in 1849 and work our way all the way up to 2431, and then work our way back to 1849 in the course of the book, and each story is somehow woven into the one that precedes and follows it. Even if it were possible to fit the vast amount of stuff that happens in the long and very ambitious book into a film, making that nested structure work in one of reasonable length did not seem possible. But I also thought that if anyone could make sense of the story in a film, Tom Tywker and the Wachowskis in collaboration might be the dream team.
I really liked the movie. Its ambitiousness was breathtaking, as was much of the filmic vision and imagination of landscape. Of course there are things I�m ambivalent about�some things that really matter to the plot were left too subtle (so subtle that you wouldn�t get them if you hadn�t read the book), while others were taken beyond the point of clarity into preachiness. I wasn�t really mad about any of the things that were added to the story in order to make it work as a film. Overall, I thought the film did a great job telling a compelling story�so much so that it kept me in rapt attention to such an extent that I didn�t notice it was 3 hours long until I left the theater and checked the time. It also did a good job dealing with the puzzle-solving aspect of how to tell all those stories at once. I really liked it a lot�it did what a film made after a book should do: made me love the story of Cloud Atlas in a different way.
But now that I�ve read some of the reviews, it�s interesting to think about how a film like that�so huge in terms of its scope, size, number of minutes, and ideas�just will divide people. Yes, number of minutes AND ideas. There is a LOT going on in the film. Often when I encounter something that complex, I remember the time when my editor at SF Weekly (I wrote music reviews for them for awhile) told me that every review should only have one idea. Ha. Maybe I was trying to do too much. Scale matters, of course. But I would have appreciated his advice more if he wasn�t trying to do too little. That sets the scene for my appreciation of Cloud Atlas.
Many of the reviews I read were written by people who clearly did not read the book�the assumptions they made about key parts of the drama show that. But that is not necessarily a failing on their part�films are usually supposed to accomplish what they accomplish on their own, without requiring homework beforehand. It may be the case that the movie makes more sense to people who have already read the book. I�m not sure.
I won�t offer any spoilers, in case you see it or read the book (and I recommend you do both�in fact, I recommend you hurry up and go see the film in the theater before it disappears, because it is worth seeing on a huge screen�don�t forget the Wachowskis are involved, and they are visionaries). But I�ll say a few things about the reviews.
One reviewer was really offended by the �Asian face makeup� in the futuristic Korea part of the narrative. He couldn�t believe how bad the attempt to make non-Asian people look Asian was. But, well, that�s not what it was! (And I�m fairly sure I would not have thought that�s what it was even if I hadn�t read the book.) That part of the narrative is about a future society where some human beings are engineered from birth (in vats rather than wombs) for servitude. In the book it is clear that the rest of the population also pays lots of money to engineer the shapes of their faces (it�s called facescaping), and I think it�s pretty clear in the film that much of the population has chosen to mold their faces to look somewhat otherworldly. They�ve even got things like phone receivers built into their cheeks. It�s not �asian face.� It�s especially clear that is true once we see the slums where people who can�t afford facescaping live�they look like the rest of us. So that�s a strange assumption, that futuristically molded faces are the asian version of blackface.
Some critics didn�t think it worked that each main character in the film appeared in each story in different roles, but I thought that was a really compelling way to make the book�s (and film�s) larger argument about human interconnectedness and the resonance each of our decisions has on other lives�within our own lifetimes and into the future. I also thought it was fun that lots of actors of one race or gender would play multiple roles across many different gender, race and age possibilities (whereas some critics thought that was a flaw� which strikes me as strangely essentialist, but I don�t want to go too deeply into the pros and cons of limiting actors to playing to their biological �type�). Some of them disappeared so deeply into the roles and makeup that I didn�t realize until later who played what role. To me that choice of repetition-and-difference was a strength rather than a weakness.
A lot of reviewers were put off by the religion or spirituality of the film. I�m not going to say that�s not there. But I don�t think it�s there in as strong a form as some people seem to think. Have we gotten to the point where any talk about life, death, and continuity over time has to be about religion? Because another, and I would argue more important and strongly argued, part of the film is about human responsibility, freewill and decision-making. And those moments�where individuals have to make choices about how to act�tend to be the same moments where many critics thought that something �religious� was being argued. I could show this by pointing to every narrative, probably, but I�ll just pick the most obvious one (and it�s not even really a spoiler): If a member of a post-apocalyptic non-literate society has a devil giving him bad advice and a prophet speaking good spirit voices to him, and he sometimes follows one and other times the other, is that a story about religion, or about the difficulty of making hard choices? One thing it is clear: it isn�t about religion in any simple way.
The novel has a lot more to say about religion, and it renders the plot much more clearly ambivalent about religion in general and christianity in particular, but, again, if the movie doesn�t develop that thread, then the we can�t use it to judge the movie.
So that�s another strange assumption: that talking about either free will or our connection with other human beings is in some way spiritual, and thus in some way religious. I can accept that idea as true only if we take spirit and religion to mean something more than the critics making these criticisms seem to mean.
Or, as the character Adam Ewing would say: with our crimes and our kindnesses, we build the future. And at each moment, even when we are determined by outside forces as we always are on some level, nonetheless, difficult as it is, the decisions are up to us. If you back up and think about the whole film, that is its argument. What we do matters to the people around us right now, and also to those in the future we are building. We are building a future, whether we act with purpose or fail to do so. Religion may help some people in some circumstance make some decisions�good and bad. But �with our crimes and kindnesses, we build our future� also strikes me as a supremely secular reminder of why who we choose to be and what we do to others matters.
I would have different things to say if we were talking about what the book�s overall argument is. That is one of them, but there are some other, also very interesting, threads in the book that don�t make it fully into the movie. And there are some breathtaking questions raised�not as questions but by the structure of the nested narratives�about whether the book has a happy or unhappy ending, that would be pretty difficult to make in a film. So if that sounds interesting to you, read the book.
I�d also have more to say if I weren�t avoiding spoilers.
But, wow, what a breathtaking use of film to tell a truly complex set of interweaving stories. And even if you just want to watch something pretty and adventurous for a few hours, you should go.
10:12 p.m. - November 19, 2012
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