REVISITING THE WACHOWSKIS
PART VI: ‘CLOUD ATLAS’
In the days leading up to the release of the new Netflix show Sense8, I’m going to be revisiting the Wachowski oeuvre, one day at a time. I’ll be looking at the movies themselves, as well as the critical reception of each film, and thinking about how this all relates to questions of film criticism at large. You can read my introduction to this little writing experiment here, where I rambled a bit about when I started to have a personal stake in how Wachowski films were being received. Warning: Some spoilers follow.
‘CLOUD ATLAS’ (2012)
Directed by: The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer
Starring: Tom Hanks as everybody, Halle Berry as everyone else, Hugh Grant as a bunch of people, Ben Whishaw as some other people, Doona Bae as the most badass clone ever and also a bunch more people, and James D’Arcy shows up a lot, and you’ll see lots of Susan Sarandons and more than one Jim Sturgess… some Jim Broadbents and Hugo Weavings…
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 66%
The Plot
Cloud Atlas tells six interlocking stories at once, each a different genre, cutting back and forth across characters, centuries, and millennia. Each actor plays multiple characters, giving the film a dreamlike, ethereal quality as souls are reincarnated and rebirthed, their relationships with each other reconnecting, failing, and starting anew with each stop along their karmic, cosmic journey.
In the Pacific Islands in 1849, Adam Ewing takes a fateful voyage aboard a storm-tossed ship, unaware that his friend is poisoning him. In the United Kingdom, 1936, gay composer Robert Frobisher writes letters to his lover Rufus Sixsmith while working on an important piece of music with the aging Vyvyan Ayers. In San Francisco, 1973, journalist Luisa Rey tries to stop corruption at a local nuclear power plant, while in London in 2012, elderly publisher Timothy Cavendish is trapped in a nightmarish nursing home by his evil brother Denny. The futuristic story set in Neo Seoul in 2144 sees a fabricant clone, Sonmi-451, rescued from her life of servitude to lead a rebellion, and finally, 106 winters after The Fall, Zachry Bailey must help the prescient Meronym journey to Mauna Sol while avoiding the cannibalistic Kona tribe.
Got all that? No? Sonmi-451 sums it up pretty nicely in her Revelation… Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future.
What’d the Critics Think?
Critics were pretty divided on Cloud Atlas, which I suppose is understandable. It’s a staggeringly unique film, one that either requires complete investment in trying to understand the various story threads, or else a willingness to sit back for the first time and let the movie wash over you like a tone poem, only watching it for its emotional effect without trying so hard to understand what it all means.
Many critics, in a by-now familiar approach to the Wachowskis’ filmography, considered the film a failure, dismissing the most important parts of how the movie functions with a wave of the hand instead of trying to engage with them. Ramin Setoodeh, in The Daily Beast, says he’s confused why the actors play multiple parts, wondering if this recycling of actors across various time periods was “a cost-cutting measure.” It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the film is in many ways about reincarnation, right? Rafer Guzman says in Newsday that “the quasi-profound message of cosmic connectedness isn’t worth the trouble,” fully admitting that he just can’t be bothered engaging with what the film is trying to say. In USA Today, Claudia Puig doesn’t think the stories are connected (?!) and thinks the film has chosen to prioritize style over substance. However, Dana Stevens in Slate thinks far too much of the movie “founders in sentimentality, gooey New Age aphorisms.” She admits that she was never once bored by the film’s 2 hour and 50 minute length, but Christy Lemire found the film a “slog.”
Some critics were willing to be optimists, however, to approach the movie on its own terms and recognize that it was attempting to do something that had never been done before. Roger Ebert, for example, called it one of the most ambitious films ever made, and he said of his peers’ attempts to “interpret” Cloud Atlas, “Any explanation of a work of art must be found in it, not taken to it… Maybe it’s simply [about] the telling of itself.” Tom Long of the Detroit News called it “exciting, exhausting, and energizing… a movie as big as life itself.” And James Rocchi writes for MSN Movies, “It is so full of passion and heart and empathy that it feels completely unlike any other modern film.”
What Did I Think?
These are the things I knew before I walked into the movie theater and bought my ticket for Cloud Atlas.
- It was directed by the Wachowskis, and I really, really like Speed Racer.
- It was co-directed by Tom Tykwer, and I really like Run Lola Run.
- Some actors played more than one part, including Tom Hanks.
That’s all. I had intentionally avoided all trailers. I would avert my eyes when walking past the giant movie poster in the hallway. I wanted everything in the movie was a complete surprise. And I was blown away. Cloud Atlas was beautiful, sad, and joyous, both loudly action-packed and quietly moving. It was laugh-out-loud funny, and it was full of meditations on the power of choices to have a rippling effect throughout time. (Again! Those Wachowskis and their recurring themes…)
During the film’s opening sequence, which chaotically introduces all six time-hopping storylines, Timothy Cavendish says in voiceover, “My extensive experience as an editor has led me to a disdain for flashbacks and flashforwards and all such tricksy gimmicks. I believe if you, dear reader, can extend your patience for just a moment, you will find that there is a method to this tale of madness.”
When I hear this line, I can’t help but smile. He’s referring to his own memoir, which he is typing, but his statement also slyly refers to Cloud Atlas itself. There is a method to Cloud Atlas’s seemingly random cutting between storylines, a virtuousic plate-spinning exercise that reminds me of nothing so much as a symphony — fitting, considering Robert Frobisher is my favorite of the many characters.
The film ebbs and flows, various storylines coming to climactic crescendoes in tandem with one other, their characters and relationships harmonizing across time. Themes repeat, come into crisp focus, and fade away, like recurring melodies. Sometimes, it cuts methodically between the storylines in order, introducing them chronologically and then cascading backwards. Sometimes the storylines seem interwoven like a sonnet, Story A / Story B / Story A / Story B, then C to D to C to D, then E / F / E / F and finally back to A. Sometimes the cuts are motivated simply by matches-on-action; as one character dashes nimbly across a narrow bridge between skyscrapers, so too does another race across a support beam on a ship. Two people will meet in one story and spark a connection, and seconds later then their equivalent characters in another will story will separate forever, only to reconnect in a third, and fall deeply, cosmically in love. When one of the characters in one of the stories pontificates on the nature of love, or destiny, or fate, we get quick glimpses of all of the stories, reminding you just where those plates are spinning while we focus on something else with more resonance right now.
This sounds heady and possibly confusing, and it definitely is. It’s only on subsequent rewatches — I’ve seen the film close to ten times now — that I’ve really begun to understand just how intricately constructed the film is. I can understand why it’s frustrating for some people that there seems at first to be no rhyme or reason to who plays what character in which storyline, or what it all means, but I love it because the movie so strongly rewards rewatching. For example, this time around I realized that in “Letters from Zedelghem,” 1936-Ben Whishaw sleeps with 1936-Jim Broadbent’s wife; then, in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” 2012-Ben Whishaw is the wife with whom 2012-Jim Broadbent has an affair.
It’s easy to look at this and think, “Hah, Ben Whishaw as a woman, that’s silly, why did they bother with all the weird makeup,” and not bother thinking about the ways that the various incarnations of each actor affect and the other characters with whom they interact, story-to-story.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about the makeup. Cloud Atlas gets a lot of criticism for the fact that many actors take on roles that require them to transgress boundaries of race and gender, underneath makeup that is sometimes not particularly convincing. (Although, sometimes it’s very, very convincing!)
So, you get the idea. This is, as the kids say on Tumblr these days, problematic. Hollywood has a race-representation problem, so it’s not necessarily ideal to have, say, white men parading around in makeup meant to make them look Asian. I definitely get that.
But here’s my thing. Cloud Atlas is so earnestly optimistic, so genuinely pure in its intention, that I can’t help but feel like calling the movie “racist” is rather misguided. Problematic, fine, but… the stuff about pretending to be a different race or gender actually has meaning for the story they’re telling. This is a movie that genuinely, earnestly believes in the power of human connection to change the course of history, to alter the very fabric of time itself. The movie doesn’t care if its actors are men or women, black, white, or Asian, straight or gay or something in between. The film genuinely believes that anyone can be anything, and that anything anyone wants to be is worth celebrating. Unless the character is played by Hugh Grant or Hugo Weaving, that is.
Many of the storylines revolve around race, around humanity’s ugly tendency to find someone to oppress no matter what the circumstances are. Whether it’s a handful of characters alone in a mansion, a stowaway self-freed slave aboard a merchant ship, or a futuristic city filled with a race of clones created for an existence solely as fast-food workers, someone somewhere is consumed by a desire for power and domination over their fellow human beings. And, yes, this desire for power frequently has a racial component. Even when Halle Berry appears believably as a white woman in the “Letters from Zedelghem” segment, Vyvyan Ayers remarks that she is Jewish and therefore an Other, and therefore his (and Frobisher’s) relationship with her is doubly marked as forbidden.
When characters aren’t crossing gender and racial boundaries, they’re frequently pingponging around economically. During one of his soul’s lowest moments karmically, Tom Hanks plays Dermott Hoggins, a rough-talking career criminal who tosses a critic off a balcony. He and his henchmen have cartoonishly over-the-top Cockney accents, often a marker of lower-class. Later, Sonmi-451 is a clone who is fabricated specifically to serve “the consumer,” asked to suffer all kinds of abuses in her fast-food restaurant that seem unconscionable… but are they really so unthinkable compared to how our own society treats minimum-wage workers? Our politicians don’t call themselves corpocrats… yet.
The movie wants us to think about all of this. It wants us to investigate our own position with relation to the power structures playing out on screen. When Sonmi-451 is taken aboard a ship to witness for herself that her fellow clones are being liquefied and fed to the living for nutrition, she is sickened. “That ship must be destroyed,” she whispers. “The systems that built it must be destroyed.”
Cloud Atlas, too, wants to dismantle any system in place that tries to tell it how it should function. Its actors can play any role, regardless of their race or gender. Its storylines can take place in any time, can skip around between any genre, alternately adhering to and then defying generic conventions at a whim. It can be funny or sad, action-packed or slow, introspective or packed with shootouts and explosions. It can be all of these things at once. And above all else, it can be allowed to Say Something.
In one of the special features for the Cloud Atlas BluRay, Lana Wachowski says, “We live in this age where everyone tries to separate thrilling and exciting, and romantic, from ideas. It’s like this kind of violation, where if you’re making exciting, then the ideas are somehow not worthy of being considered.”
Well, in my opinion, the Wachowskis’ ideas are very worthy of being considered. I like my movies thrilling and exciting, but I also like to be asked to think while I watch them. And the Wachowskis always expect a lot of me. And I really appreciate that.
PS. How did I get to the end without mentioning the fact that Cloud Atlas has one of my favorite scores in cinematic history? In conclusion, check out “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” the song that Robert Frobisher spends his last days composing. It’s stunning. I listen to it on my walk to work sometimes, and it makes the world seem just that much more full of possibility.
PART VII: ‘JUPITER ASCENDING’ (coming soon)→
