cloud atlas: transcending a lot of things that aren't usually transcended

Going in, I already knew that Cloud Atlas was about the grand interconnectedness of humanity. The voice-over in the trailer as much as says, "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others past and present." Okay, but how would the film show that?

You can probably already glean from the trailer that there are multiple plots followed in the film, but maybe it's not so obvious that the six stories (yes, really) of Cloud Atlas cross eras and genres. Some are adventures, some are tragedies, one is a comedy. A few are set in the past, one in the present, and two in the future. When I take these together, as a single piece of art, trying to fit all these moods and time periods into my brain all at once, I feel as though the director x 3 (there are three: Andy and Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer) has succeeded in making palpable the breadth of human experience.

It isn't just that there are six stories. The trick, I think, is the way that plots don't ever converge, or even come close to converging, on a single mood or tone. The comedy of 2012 is lighthearted and goofy; the near(er) future is kind of horrifying and cold; the plot of 1973 is a thriller. It's a kind of odd lot of stories with no overarching theme except maybe that they are all stories. This is a mash-up that doesn't even try to reconcile all of its different parts, and the next logical step to take from there is to feel that all of these parts are equally important, a grand tapestry.

(Somewhere in this movie there's a comment on how stories themselves are part of the human condition, since the six story lines are made to be part of one universe by literally referencing themselves as stories, in passing, in the form of novels, letters, artifacts, and even movies. But there's a lot more there than I can do justice to right now without getting derailed.)

This multi-genre schizo combo is a sort of logical extension of the "network narratives" principle from Babel and Crash. This term "network narratives" refers to stories that pull several smaller sub-tales into a bigger one, even though the sub-tales are only incidentally related on the face of it. But Cloud Atlas feels like it's blowing that idea up big and taking it to new places; it feels innovative, not derivative.

So there's all that. Anyway, another thing I liked about the movie was it's deployment of a strange tactic that at first seems dumbly obvious but whose execution makes it engaging. First, you have to understand that each major actor plays several different characters, one in each story for the most part. That's the part that may seem dumbly obvious on its own. But then, out of left field, the director x 3 has decided that the actors will sometimes play characters outside of their race and gender, and none of the other characters will notice.

For the forthcoming commentary to make sense, I first need to get it out there that I assume the director x 3 was not so delusional as to think these trans-racial/gender deals were so well made up that we didn't immediately spot them. They're completely obvious for the most part. You can see right away that, as a filmmaking approach/gimmick, this has the immediate risk of looking silly, especially if the audience thinks the director x 3 actually is so delusional as to think these actors are passing themselves off as men/women/people of other races.

And, in any event, this creates some strange moments, especially nearer the beginning. For me, when a kind of transracial Halle Berry was introduced as a Jewish woman, I just made a face. At this point, I was still learning to read the movie for what it was. It was too early to realize that this whole racial and gender play was going to be a theme in the movie, so it just seemed ridiculous.

But after I'd seen some randomly re-gendered or re-raced character several times, it became almost unremarkable, and even, bizarrely, a motif. A motif all the better because it had something vaguely to do with us all being connected — if you recall, a big theme of the film — but it wasn't exactly clear what it meant, which in turn created that sweet spot of ambiguity that I think marks great movies.

The transracial bit, especially in the story set in a 2144 version of Korea, has gotten some criticism for the director x 3. This section is a little different from the rest in that it’s not even clear what the director x 3 is shooting for with the transracial actor-character lineup. In this slice of the movie, every white actor has some serious facial reconfiguration to make them look kinda-sorta-East-Asian-maybe, even while regular ol' real East Asians (or at least people who are descended from them) are actually running around. It's not clear if the whites-as-East-Asians are supposed to be a different race (the powerful "Unanimity") or if we're just supposed to take them as regular East Asians (like the way we've done with everybody else in other time periods who is obviously not of the race/gender they're supposed to be). Somewhere late in this 2144 story, black actor Keith David shows up with that quasi-Korean look, at which point you just really don't know what to think anymore.

Confusing, huh? This was a sort of technical error on the part of the director x 3, I'd say, because at the very least, we should know whether the white actors (and Keith David, I suppose) were supposed to be taken as real East Asians or some other future race. Anyway, by the time the one of the last transracial characters shows up — a Korean actress looking like a completely implausible daughter of a white slaver in San Francisco in 1949 — it all makes a kind of loopy sense in that it doesn't make sense but is consistent with the principles of the movie. In other words, it's confounding and kind of brilliant.

There was a last reason for me to like Cloud Atlas, one that was only more evident upon reflection. It's the way the director x 3 plays off the audience's expectations with the way actors are used. With Tom Hanks, I actually found this irritating, for reasons that are pretty much wholly arbitrary and probably just grumpy: When I see Tom Hanks playing a swarthy (or maybe tanned) Cockney gangster, or a buck-toothed, straw-hat-wearing geek, it’s nigh-impossible to find him credible, and it even feels like his presence is saying, "Look, underneath this ridiculous get-up is that lovable everyman, Tom Hanks! Isn't it funny when I wear costumes but we both really know I'm making fun of the character I'm supposed to be?" I mean, I love Hanks and find him totally sympathetic when he is vulnerable in this movie, but apparently this is the only way I can accept him, no thanks to Hollywood using him in this very capacity in almost every film he's in. I just can't bear to think of the guy as unlikable or even as anything other than a protagonist.

The really uncanny use of an actor here, though, is that of Hugh Grant, whose mere presence in this film seems like some sort of wink to the audience, like Mike Tyson in The Hangover or the entire cast of The Expendables. Grant's transformations across the film feel like the director x 3 is seriously messing with us. Remember that incredibly charming guy with the winning accent and dry humor from Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love, Actually, and Notting Hill? I would be lying if I said I didn't think the Grant was heartbreakingly adorable in all of these movies, and I think we the audience hope and secretly believe that he's actually that sweet in real life. That's why it's a stroke of genius to have him dressed up as some sort of blood-thirsty cannibal with face paint, or as a gruff old bastard with a callous for a face and perfectly white teeth. It's one more great, inexplicable detail in a movie full of them.