BEFORE: Getting back on track for Comic-Con - as John Lithgow from "Cliffhanger" was also in "New Year's Eve", and so was Halle Berry (last seen in "Perfect Stranger"). Yeah, I wish I could have put all the Halle Berry films together, but then I couldn't have had the three Bruce Willis films all in a row. It's a constant trade-off process.
AFTER: OK, let's just get this comment out of the way right off. WTF? What the HELL did I just watch? I mean, I knew it was going to be weird and outside of the box, but this is just... where the hell is the box? What did you guys do with the box? It's like this film tore up the box into tiny pieces and built a little abstract sculpture out of it...
OK, I've vented and I feel a little better now. Let's treat this like what it is, which is a bold, innovative new approach to storytelling. Once in a while, a film like "Memento" or "Sin City" or "Pulp Fiction" comes around and messes with the narrative form in some way. (I'm also big on "Slaughterhouse Five" myself...) There are 6 stories here, and the film has a running time of almost three hours - and they cut quite liberally between the different stories, which represent 6 different time periods - past, present and future. Oh, and the same main actors appear in all of the stories, only they play different characters, representing different classes, races and genders. If you're an actor and you get offered a set of roles like this, you'd probably take it just for the challenge alone, and the fact that it represents a unique experience.
The only other way I can describe this properly, if you haven't seen it - it's kind of like channel-surfing through 6 films at a time. In this hyper-fast ADHD world, maybe this is just what today's audience wants. Then again, maybe this would really piss you off, because you're made to watch just 5 minutes or so of each storyline before you're shunted away to one of the other 5 storylines. There are some clever edits here, they may cut from one event in one storyline to a similar event or motif taking place in another year. Which SHOULD piss me off, because it makes it seem like these 6 storylines are happening simultaneously, when by their very definition, such a thing is impossible. All of the past events are past, and the fates of those characters have been determined, long before the story taking place decades or even centuries later even gets started.
This is NOT time-travel - but the events are all connected in a loose-fitting way. If there's any time-travel involved, it's something akin to the omniscient camera being wherever and whenever it needs to be, in order to tell the story that the directors want, in a particular (or random?) order, to achieve the desired effect. And what IS that effect? In the end, this becomes like a giant filmic jigsaw puzzle, where you can only see the individual pieces at any given time, and you may not be able to see the whole picture until all of the pieces are in place.
Let's say you took 6 of your favorite movies - for argument's sake, lets choose "Amistad", "Amadeus", "The China Syndrome", "As Good As It Gets", "Blade Runner" and "Avatar" (this is a loose approximation of films and plotlines that nearly match the time periods represented here...) and imagine that you cut up all of those films into little clips, and strung them all together (while still maintaining the proper narrative order for each film). Or maybe if youo put those films into a 6-disc changer and hit "shuffle play", and the DVD player was able to jump between all the different chapters in the films. That's not entirely accurate, but it's close.
For a while, my BFF Andy was saying that he had an idea to cut together clips from three famous Hollywood Christmas films, creating the ultimate holiday movie, "It's a Wonderful Christmas Carol Miracle on 34th St." I don't know if he was putting me on, or if it would even be possible to arrange scenes from those films into a semi-coherent narrative, or if that would only result in a confusing mess. Either way, I'd still like to see the plan for that. That's sort of what's taking place here.
What's astonishing is that "Cloud Atlas" isn't more of a confusing mess. To some degree it is exactly that, a huge confusing mess - but if you are able to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream with it, there MIGHT be a larger work of art here - and I'm thinking along the lines of a Picasso or a Jackson Pollock - that's visible or even intangible. Is there a larger point being made here?
If so, it's one of those things that you'll never see by looking directly at it. It's very bright, like looking at the sun, so you have to look sort of in its direction, or shield your eyes somehow. To paraphrase it, because I think that's the best that I can do, it's sort of about rising up, battling the powers that be, or the conventions that are somehow keeping people down, and that's a noble cause in any era. This is why I don't think that the dates of the segments are an accident - in 1849 the issue is slavery, in 1936 it has to do with gay rights as well as taking credit for creating music, in 1973 it's fossil fuels vs. nuclear power, in 2012 it's people being abused in a nursing home, in 2144 we're back to slavery (only with Korean clones/replicants this time) and in the post-apocalyptic future, nomadic tribesmen are threatened by a group of crazy cannibals.
The question becomes, in each era, what's it going to take for an individual to rise up and revolt? Even if that revolt is largely personal or theoretical, what's it going to take for you to fight the powers that be? There's a very telling quote somewhere in here that says, "we see ourselves only through the eyes of others" - and isn't that the very nature of fiction? We see the stories of other people, and we take them in, and we draw from them, and we use them to define ourselves. And what do we see in those stories? Well, they're probably not going to focus on the boring days, the days where nothing happened - they're going to be about revolt and revolution, or the days we decided to get up off our asses and DO something about our situation.
Plus there's another principle at play here, something as elusive as water running through your hands - it's the realization that our actions DO have consequences, sometimes ones that reach far beyond our own lifespans, and that's a very easy thing to forget on a daily basis. Every moment is a chance to change the future - acts of kindness can have effects that we can't see, ones that could even impact future generations. Meanwhile, crimes or acts of savagery may seem more prevalent, to the point where they become part of the daily grind, essentially background noise, but eventually there comes a tipping point where right-thinking people have had just about enough of that, thanks. And then we create these ripples through our actions that have the potential to resonate for years to come - if we're doing it right, that is.
The film falls just shy of defining this process, whether you call it karma or schadenfreude or whatever - maybe if you define it, you kill it. Maybe there's no proper word for the way the universe works, because none of us can truly see it or be able to properly understand it, so how could we possibly define it? Since none of us know what's outside the scope of our pathetic knowledge, why did we, as a society, let a small bunch of religious nutcases try to define concepts that they couldn't possibly understand? How do we know that we all aren't just essentially bacteria living on a giant organism called Earth? Or we're all just ants in an ant-farm, or exhibits in an alien zoo or just brains in a lab somewhere?
But I digress. You may just want to watch this to see the same actors taking on different roles (a handy visual guide is provided during the end credits, so you can see who played who in each scenario...) Some of this probably is very controversial, since a black woman played a white woman, and several Caucasian actors played Asian roles, with make-up altering their eyes. If blackface is wrong, then whiteface (and "yellowface") should also be wrong - unless you consider this an exercise in challenging stereotypes. (Nope, still wrong on some level.) I remember years ago when the actor Jonathan Pryce got cast in the Broadway production of "Miss Saigon", and was going to wear make-up that altered his eyes. Oh, the Asian Actors Union had a field day with that - why couldn't they hire an ASIAN actor to play a (half-)Asian character? Well, they hired the guy for his singing and acting ability, not the shape of his eyes. If you want racially-blind casting, it's got to go both ways. If you want Asian actors up for non-Asian parts, what's wrong with going the other way? Besides, the character was Half-Asian, so what else can you do? (Nope, still wrong on some level.)
When it's all over and the jigsaw puzzle is completed (I'd stop reading here if you want to truly experience this for yourself, with no spoilers. Seriously, stop now and I won't mind a bit. This could be a very personal journey of understanding for some people and I don't want to influence it...) and you can see the big picture, some of the patterns are clear. You might realize that each of the film's 6 feature actors is essentially the focal point of one of the segments, and the other actors are woven in and out of their stories. An actor might be the star of one segment, and a background player in another. What's curious is that each of the 6 central characters has a similarly shaped birthmark - so if there's any nod here toward rebirth or reincarnation, or history repeating itself, it's among those 6 souls. You might think that the 6 characters who look like Tom Hanks are meant to be the same soul, but that's just one interpretation - it ain't necessarily so.
I did pick up on something of an agenda - it's no secret that Lana Wachowski, one of the directors, was born Larry Wachowski, so I think that does put something of a spin on this, especially when you see male characters played by women and vice-versa. And if there's one letter I have trouble comprehending in the LGBT acronym, I freely admit that it's the "T". (How do you KNOW you feel like a woman trapped in a man's body? How do you KNOW you'll feel better if you get the surgery? And if gender is arbitrary and just a social construct, then why do you feel the need to change it?) But maybe that's something I'm reading into this, I fully understand that there are many ways to interpret this film, one of which might be to write it off as a big, confusing mess and then continue to ignore it.
And at the end of the day, I think that's what we've got here - a big, confusing mess, but when you take a step back from it and look at it when it's done, somehow it's got flashes of brilliance to it. To really appreciate all of the connections between the stories, it definitely demands multiple viewings, even though it clocks in at nearly three hours. Go figure.
I wonder if, at some point, it makes sense to watch the 6 stories one at a time, starting with the oldest and working forward in time. Something akin to the "Godfather Saga" cut where the flashbacks were all put into proper linear order and you could really trace the rise of Don Corleone, without it being interspersed with Michael's story. I'd be curious to see if the 6 individual stories could each stand on their own, or if it's really the non-linear storytelling device here that elevates the entire project.
Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "The Ladykillers"), Jim Broadbent (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Jim Sturgess (last seen in "One Day"), Hugo Weaving (last seen in "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"), Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw (last seen in "Skyfall"), Hugh Grant (last seen in "The Remains of the Day"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Keith David (last seen in "Where the Heart Is"), James D'Arcy, David Gyasi, Xun Zhou.
RATING: 6 out of 10 journal entries
