Welcome To My Ego

What came first?  The chicken or the egg?

What came first?  The language, or the tales we weave with it?  “But,” you ask, “how can you tell a tale without language?”

(Watch a shadow puppet performance sometime, and then get back to me on that particular point.)

I like to read online movie reviews.  Given that I now live in the West Coast flyover, I often miss the casual yet endless Los Angeles conversations about what a film meant, and how its meaning was created or achieved. Reading these reviews, while not a conversation, is a fascinating way to gauge perceptions of these films.  What a film is is what you bring to it, and there are many, many different things that people bring to movies.

But often you read others’ reviews, and you wonder – “Were they even watching the same movie that I was?”  This was very much the case with CLOUD ATLAS.

The complaints were numerous — too many characters, too many timelines, too much cross-cutting between these too many timelines and characters. The default description of the book is, in this case, “unfilmable.” And that’s before we even get to the casting of multiple actors as multiple characters across multiple ethnicities.

A lot has been made of the casting – and makeup – in CLOUD ATLAS. And in times where we see casting white actors in “brown face” as depriving non-white actors of roles, it was certainly — a choice. But, to give credit to the filmmakers, they gave the opportunity for all of the actors to play all types, with some performances being more successful than others. But that also meant some pretty extensive makeup.

And that makeup is sometimes very successful – but also sometimes very distracting.,

Yes, James D’Arcy looks more Romulan than Korean.

And the only way to describe Hugo Weaving’s take on Nurse Ratchett is “Monty Python-esque.”

A white man cast as an Asian man?  That brings up some bad feelings about the era of the “Yellow Peril.”

A black woman cast as a Jewish woman?  How … um … very Eddie Murphy of her?

An Asian woman cast as a … wait, not to be too insensitive, but something just seems off with the makeup.

WTF?  I guess getting caught in the back seat of the car with a hooker leads you down some seriously strange paths …

While some have interpreted this casting as the idea that we all are living repeated lives, re-incarnated from one situation to the next, having to learn or repeat the past – and one dream sequence does appear to support this notion – I found this casting more in line with how the classic film THINGS TO COME (1936) used casting.

CLOUD ATLAS has multiple characters, all spread out over several periods of time.  Cast each character with a separate actor, and you end up with a dizzying array of faces to keep up with.  But CLOUD ATLAS (and THINGS TO COME before it), gets past this little problem by casting the same actors in each of the different time-frames, giving us a consistency of experience that is somewhat easier to follow.  And, to make things even smoother, each actor is cast thematically.  Each actor is being cast for the traits that their character encompass.

Tom Hanks is the selfish, insecure coward.

Hugo Weaving is the enforcer of the status quo.

Halle Berry is the voice of hope.

Hugh Grant is what a person becomes without empathy. (As his various characters, not as a person, himself. Just wanted to make that clear.)

As entertaining as they are, the plots of the various stories are actually somewhat irrelevant. Each of the stories pivots around some form of injustice, some way we have found to mistreat our fellow humans — or how we create new beings to abuse and mistreat.  But none of that is really what the movie is about.  While each of these stories has pathos and horror and triumph, none of the them are related to each other in any way.  Except for the one moment in each of them — the moment that mirrors the very first scene of the movie.

Simply put, this is a movie about the tales we tell, and how they inspire us to become the tales that will be told.  From the very first story told around the campfire, to the religions we make of legends, we hear or read or watch tales that speak to our place in life, that hear our pain, and that give us answers.  History is in the stories, and the stories give us a path to follow. CLOUD ATLAS makes its characters the seed of a story that inspire the next story, the next generation. The language of CLOUD ATLAS is not the action or drama or comedy (although there is a lot of that included), but the characters being inspired by those who came before.

Unfilmable? Hardly. Just not the kind of film that viewers can watch while second screening.

“Yeah, so?  What did you actually think of the movie?”

I thought it was wonderful, and is a film that still occupies my rewatch rotation.  It is also further evidence that the Wachoski’s post-MATRIX output has been consistently underrated, at best.

All images are ©Warner Bros. Studios (or Paramount. or the Ellisons. or Donald Trump. Who knows these days …?)