Cloud Atlas

The movie Cloud Atlas came out in the fall of 2012, receiving a ten minute standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival followed by extremes of high praise or heavy tongue lashings from both the critics and public. Not a money-maker at the box office, it appears to have just broken even to-date. It is a film lacking ambivalence: you are either bored or couldn’t possibly be bored no matter how many times you watch it; you hate it or love it.

With respect for personal preference, I confess that I believe Cloud Atlas the film to be a masterpiece and here’s why.

First, rather than repeating the exact content of the original book, it uses the medium of film to fully explore the book’s themes. Actors are given souls to play numerous characters with different genders and races. You get to the point that you “see” Hugo Weaving or Hugh Grant’s “soul” in a character and you know he or she will represent evil and oppression in some way. Likewise, Jim Sturgess appears and there will be heroism. Jim Broadbent appears and there will be self-seeking cowardice.

It’s an interesting situation. Typically, the preference is to mask the actor, but in this case recognizing the actor is a thematic device. Brilliant! Thus, when the attempts to make actors look Asian or white or a different gender seem forced, it can be forgiven because of the importance of recognizing the actor in order to follow the soul. At the same time, another theme emerges: if the same soul can be any race or gender, then it underscores our commonality as equally valuable human beings.

Second, it is no surprise that the movie won awards for editing. After watching the movie, I was intrigued to find out how it could possibly be written as a novel. A masterpiece itself, the book has a completely different form. Author David Mitchell describes it as a mirror, some refer to it as nesting dolls, and I thought of a pendulum.

“This ‘there-and-back’ structure always struck me as unfilmable,” wrote David Mitchell in the Wall Street Journal on October 19, 2012, “which is why I believed that Cloud Atlas would never be made into a movie. I was half right. It has now been adapted for the screen, but as a sort of pointillist mosaic: We stay in each of the six worlds just long enough for the hook to be sunk in, and from then on the film darts from world to world at the speed of a plate-spinner, revisiting each narrative for long enough to propel it forward.”

The screenwriters chose to capitalize on the strengths of the film medium by moving between the six different settings in a way that at first seems random and then begins to make sense. The “jailbreaks” in the different stories are layered together. The backlash of evil weaves through each story simultaneously and the courageous acts that bring rescue are viewed in parallel in a way that feels like the forces of good against evil for all time.

Some characters say the exact same words as others in different time periods. “The weak are meat the strong do eat” is said in 1849 and 2321. “I will not be subject to criminal abuse” in 2012 and 2144. And the core theme of the movie is spoken by Sonmi-451 (yes, echoes of Fahrenheit 451) and becomes scripture to the people living in 2321: “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb we are bound to others. By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

On my fifth viewing of the movie, I decided that Tom Hanks’ soul was the main character (for the movie, not the book). He begins the movie as an old man telling stories in a future world, of course we don’t know that right away, and it ends as he finishes telling stories to his grandchildren around a campfire on a distant planet. This is a complete deviation from the book, but one that works well to demonstrate the theme that a soul is not locked into its behavior, but can make a different choice.

In the movie, Tom Hanks’ soul moves through time as a murderer, usurer, scientist at an unethical company (killed right when he chooses good), murderer again (quite the shock), and finally a cowardly tribesman tempted by evil who chooses good. The movie gives the impression that the Halle Berry soul helps him to choose better.

In the book, there is one reincarnated soul traced by a comet birthmark on the shoulder. The movie also includes the birthmark, but it is found in different places and having one doesn’t mean you have the same soul as someone else who had a birthmark. The two ideas get a little muddy in the movie at times.

Another characteristic of a masterpiece is the linger effect. At the end of the movie (and similarly the book), I felt a sense of responsibility with purpose. Not in an “oh no, what has the world come to, I have to do something” kind of way, but in an empowering, the world has always been like this and I have the power to make something better through the choices I make. I came away from both feeling optimistic and not only wanting to make a positive difference, but believing that I actually can. That’s a terrific lingering effect from a book and a movie.

Not only our actions, but the things we create impact others in the future. A diary written in 1849 is read in 1936; letters written in 1936 are read in 1973; a novel about a company conspiracy disclosure in 1973 is read in 2012; a movie about comic happenings in an old folks’ home in 2012 is watched in 2144; and an orison from 2144 is heard and seen in 2321; and a composition, a sextet, written in 1936 plays in some variation in every setting. We witness people becoming inspired to action by the words and ideas of others, and those others would never have imagined the impact their words and ideas were to have.

I like a movie I can keep discovering and that gets me thinking about interesting and imaginative questions. Is a clone human? Does a clone have a soul? Do we dream the future? Are we able to tell the untold stories of other lives through some form of collective unconscious?

Masterpieces in their own right, I recommend both the movie and the book, and in no particular order, to be watched, read and discovered again and again and again.

Click here for Roger Ebert’s review of Cloud Atlas the Movie.