A Life in Six Stars (A Cloud Atlas review)

Poster by Tumblr user WatsonPrime.

"The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!"

Friedrich Nietszche, The Gay Science

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

James Hopwood Jeans 

I. Dogs of Diogenes

Most of the people who know me, or who just take a glance at my Facebook timeline, would tell you I'm cynical. I question what's presented, tear it open, and try to divine the truth from its entrails. In truth, it's a side of me I'm actively trying to fight, or at least keep on a leash. To be a cynic nowadays means to be jaded, to have little to no faith in humanity. This isn't, of course, how it used to be. The philosophy of Cynicism, the kind espoused by Antisthenes and Diogenes and the like, espoused virtue above all else, prizing a free happy life as the greatest thing one could possibly have.

I wouldn't say being a Cynic, rather than a small-c cynic, appeals much more to me. Being a Cynic sounds like going straight-edge, or like following a warrior's code; nothing is more important than virtue. Not money, not power, not hygiene, not reputation, not society. The name itself comes from the Ancient Greek "kynikos", meaning "dog-like", and initially lent itself to insults; Cynics were frequently called dogs for rejecting societal norms and living in the streets, though Diogenes took it as a compliment: other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends to save them. To be a dog meant being free and loyal to your cause.

At some point down the line, Cynicism lost the privilege of a capital letter, moving from evangelical crusader for happiness to bitter loner on the outer fringes of society. And while small-c cynics can certainly have an eye for improving life and human interaction - that's probably what fuels our most well-known grumpy bastards - all too often, that noble goal gets lost in favour of being perpetually disillusioned and getting a sense of grim satisfaction when things go tits-up. It's trendy to be cynical. It's even bled through into our entertainment, with the heroes of Western fiction - films, video games, TV, comics - becoming increasingly harder and sociopathic, to better appeal to our power fantasies. Even when they "win", it's a Pyrrhic victory. Man of Steel ends with Superman killing the last survivors of Krypton. John McClane is no longer an Everyman cop who can get hurt, he's a Category 5 hurricane made of bullets.

Too many of us are cynics.

II. From Heaven to the Gutter

Talking about Cloud Atlas really is like dancing about architecture. The original novel by David Mitchell has a narrative structure like a Chinese puzzle box, with six different stories in six different styles nestled within each other, interrupting one another before reaching the middle, with each one being wrapped up in succession. These stories are, in order:

1. American lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) travelling across the Pacific Ocean in 1849, saving a runaway Polynesian slave (David Gyasi) from death even as he slowly succumbs to illness from a parasite. His adventures are chronicled in a journal, read by...
2. English musician Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), disgraced son of a wealthy family, as he flees to Edinburgh (Belgium in the book), to become the apprentice of renowned composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent) and prove himself as a musician. He writes about his experiences to his lover Sixsmith (James D'Arcy), who retains the letters well in to old age, which eventually fall into the hands of...
3. Investigative journalist Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), who is tipped off by an aged Sixsmith about foul play involving a new nuclear reactor being developed in San Francisco during the 1970s. Key figures in the reactor's development turn up dead, and time's running out on Rey to figure out the mystery. Her story becomes the basis of a manuscript, Half-Lives: The Mystery of Luisa Rey, read by...
4. Vanity-press publisher Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent) in 2012, experiencing quite a windfall when his Irish gangster client throws a well-known critic out a window. Eventually, his client's family come knocking for their share, and in an attempt to flee London ends up being tricked by his elder brother (Hugh Grant) into incarceration at a brutal nursing home. He soon turns this into a screenplay called The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, a film watched by...
5. Somni~451 (Doona Bae), a clone waitress living in a futuristic Korea, forced into servitude by the caste system. After her friend is killed for disobeying orders, she's taken under the wing of a revolutionary movement and falls in love with one of their leaders, Hae-Joo Chang (Sturgess). The movement fails, and before her execution, she makes one last recorded statement to the world, which centuries later becomes the holy text of a religion followed by...
6. Zachry (Tom Hanks), a shepherd who lives on the island formally known as Hawaii, 106 winters after "The Fall". After his tribe is beset by the cannibalistic Kona tribe, he allies with Meronym (Berry), the ambassador of the last remnants of futuristic society, to preserve what's left of "The Smarts"; the technology their ancestors left behind.

The structure looks something like this.

What's particularly clever is how they all link. Each story is a text being read by the protagonist in the next narrative; the transcription of a revolutionary's last words in Story E becomes the basis for a religion in Story F, for example. And then there's the very real possibility that these stories may not be completely true. Frobisher notes how Ewing's journal seems too neatly structured to be the real thing, yet his own composition, the Cloud Atlas Sextet, is structured exactly like the novel, a sextet with overlapping stories, and a character in his story reappears in Half-Lives, which is a manuscript for a novel. It's metafictional, stories within tales buried in narratives.

It's this unique structure that led many to declare the book unfilmable, but people should really know by now that particular label will only dare filmmakers to try even harder. Tom Tykwer managed to get a decent adaptation out of Patrick Susskind's Perfume: Story of a Murderer, another daunting task for bibliophilic screenwriters. But he couldn't do this alone; he needed the help of Andy and Lana Wachowski, massive fans of the book, and who have never shied from the task of trying to carry big ideas to a mainstream audience. The Matrix was a distillation of Baudrillard and Plato and Gnosticism, after all, wrapped up in a kung-fu superhero action movie. Hell, Tykwer's own Run Lola Run dabbled in talks of free will versus determinism and chaos theory, giving a philosophical bent to a hard and fast action film scored to pulsing techno.

In short, these three specialised in the mixture of high and low culture. In that sense, they were the perfect people to adapt Cloud Atlas.

III. "The Weak Are Meat..."

Mitchell described the story as being about "predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals"; cannibalism and greed are recurring features in all the stories. Dr Goose (Hanks) remarks to Ewing that the Pacific beach they're standing on was once "a cannibal's banquetting hall"; Ayrs intends to screw Frobisher out of the royalties earned from The Cloud Atlas Sextet; the greed of an energy company causes Rey to start sniffing around; Cavendish flees to Aurora House, unable to pay his client's murderous family, and jokingly wails about how "Soylent Green is made of people!" to the confused residents; fabricants who've served their purpose are a cheap source of protein in Neo-Seoul; Zachry's tribe are routinely at danger of becoming the Kona tribe's dinner. As Goose puts it, "the weak are meat, and the strong do eat."

The Wachowskis are fond of this as a trope. All of their works are about free-spirited individuals fighting against a faceless System, the tide forever bashing against the rocks until it's shaped for the better. Speed Racer sees the title character and his family continuing to race in defiance of a decades-long conspiracy to fix competitions for corporate interests. The Matrix has the faceless Caucasian government agents as servants for a collective of machines leeching humanity of power, while the free people of Zion are multi-racial and full of life. Their script for V for Vendetta has the System in its most primal form - a tyrannical government who rule over every aspect of life, using the outsiders (the blacks, the gays, the foreigners) as lab rats.

Such is the case with Cloud Atlas. Every story has the protagonist fighting against their fate, in bitter refusal that this is how things are meant to be. The most obvious is Somni waking up from a life of drugged ignorance, living as a slave with the hopes of one day reaching the end of her contract, and bringing down the corporate government. It manifests in other ways, however. Frobisher wants to prove to his "Pater" that he can make it on his own, and his attempts to retain the rights to his Sextet lead to him going on the run from the law yet again. Aurora House is a prison, but Cavendish and his motley crew attempt to break out regardless. Ewing's actions lead to Autua becoming a freeman, and he and his wife later announce their intentions to join the abolitionists, a decision that riles his father-in-law: "there is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well".

This natural order, then, is where those with power prey on those who are weak. Hugo Weaving, in all of his roles, represents this idea in various aspects: an assassin hired by a greedy power company, a sadistic nurse, a bureaucrat, a Nazi (albeit a sympathetic one, characterised more by his unrequited love, though still a representative of assholes with power), a demonic trickster. All of his appearances, from Haskell Moore to the fiendish Ol' Georgie, mark The Way Things Are; even his Nazi commander is resigned to the fact his love for the Jewish Jocasta can never be, because that is the order of things.

IV. Psychography

At its core, Cloud Atlas is the story of one individual as they fight against the establishment to varying degrees of success. This one individual is male and female, old and young, of various classes and races and nationalities and sexualities. This individual is denoted by the presence of a birthmark on their person, in the shape of a comet; it appears on Ewing's chest, Frobisher's lower back, Rey's shoulder, Cavendish's leg, Somni's neck, Zachry's head. There's something very Buddhist about this; the idea of a single soul returning to the mortal coil over and over again evokes samsara, a repeating cycle of reincarnation (across six realms, fittingly enough; six is somewhat important to the narrative).

With that, Mitchell, Tykwer and the Wachowskis manage to have their cake and eat it, crafting a story that's human and intimate, while also being epic on an unprecedented scale - not just in terms of setting, hopping back and forth from post-apocalyptic Hawaii to Edinburgh at the turn of war, but the characters. Cloud Atlas has a large principal cast of thirteen actors (American, British, South Korean, Chinese and Australian) playing multiple roles across all of its six stories, spanning gender and, controversially, race. Tom Hanks is a Scottish hotel manager, an Irish gangster and an American scientist; Halle Berry is a black journalist, a white Jewish socialite, an Indian partygoer, a male Korean doctor; Doona Bae is an American and a Mexican; Hugo Weaving is a woman and a demon; Hugh Grant is a decaying English millionaire and a proud cannibal chieftain.

On a surface level, this racebending is uncomfortable. The film industry does have a reputation for casting white actors in roles meant to be played by non-whites (just look at The Last Airbender, with white kids playing unmistakably Inuit and Tibetan parts, or Johnny Depp and his barely-there Cherokee ancestry as Tonto in The Lone Ranger), and while Cloud Atlas is a German production, it looks guilty of that particular charge. Jim Sturgess as Hae-Joo Chang comes off the worst, though not for lack of effort on the actor's part. He's trying, but stifled by Korean make-up that's just flat-out unconvincing. To be fair, Bae's Caucasian prosthetics and very noticeable contacts are similarly dodgy. In any other film, I would call bullshit, but Cloud Atlas feels genuinely progressive in some ways. Halle Berry can appear in a period movie as someone other than a slave, and Ben Whishaw can play a neglected wife. Given that the film is about eternal recurrence, the idea that all of this has happened before and shall happen again, it makes sense. It's post-racial casting, and is decades - if not centuries - ahead of its time. The day will come when we can legitimately cast actors in roles regardless of race, but sadly that day is not today.

Speaking in terms of acting, this can get distracting; while Hanks is clearly having fun playing a Cockney-Irish brute, you can't escape the fact he's playing a cartoon, and the film will probably earn several rewatches just through games of "Spot-The-Actor". This may be intentional. It's quite jarring seeing Hanks as a kindly scientist and heroic shepherd one minute, then a giggling obsequious doctor and greedy hotel manager the next, and Jim Broadbent going from fun-cantankerous (as Cavendish) to hateful-cantankerous (as Ayrs) (could we call this switch "putting on Ayrs"?), as though the film is blurring the lines between heroism and villainy. Other times, it creates parallels; Sturgess and Bae, when on-screen, play couples, one doomed (Somni and Chang), one saved (Adam and Tilda Ewing). It's gauging your attention, forcing you to look for links. It's the difference between viewing a story as a single thread, and viewing all the stories as forming a tapestry.

The dodgier elements are, thankfully, minor, and rarely the focus of the stories. The central characters are superbly cast: Hanks's Zachry is wonderful even while speaking in a futuristic Creole, a man haunted by the devil on his shoulder but prepared to swallow his fear regardless. As Luisa Rey, Berry is the best she's ever been, tough and warm and sympathetic. Broadbent gets to showcase his skills as a dramatic actor as the scaborous Ayrs, and his comedic side as Cavendish; it probably helps that Cavendish is delightfully pompous and bumbling, rather than the bigoted jerk he is in the book. The stand-out by far, though, has to be Ben Whishaw. He plays Frobisher as arrogant and bullheaded, but thoughtful and bright and full of love: for music, and for his beloved Sixsmith. Whishaw's been one to watch for a while - his lithe build, androgynous beauty and knife-like tongue have seen him play Shakespeare's Ariel, angelic killer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and MI6's snide gadgeteer Q, but Cloud Atlas sees him firing on all cylinders, burning with youthful pride and ambition, and is the perfect fit for the most romantic of the six stories.

V. In Concerto

The novel's Matryoshka doll-like structure would have never worked on film, so Tykwer and the Wachowskis went with a different way of presenting the stories. Mitchell referred to it as a "mosaic"; Wikipedia calls it "hyperlink cinema". Examples of the latter description include Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Fernando Meirelles's City of God, or (more popularly) Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. It's a type of cinematic storytelling where whole plotlines interlock with each other, often in a nonlinear fashion, where connections between these often disparate stories are gradually revealed.

Cloud Atlas the film operates on the same principle. The audience is given a brief introduction to the status quos of each story, in order, and then cuts between each of them. The main narrative flow is rapidly diverted time and time again, with transitions often handled on-screen; a car in 1975 can turn the corner and the scene would cut to a hovercar in 2144, for instance. Eventually, you begin to see links between them; Somni and Chang consummating their relationship is juxtaposed with Frobisher's dream where he and Sixsmith destroy a china shop in slow-motion. How much is intentional, and how much is us seeing patterns that aren't there, like looking for familiar shapes amidst the clouds? It's the cinematic equivalent of spinning multiple plates; or, maybe more accurately, like a sextet. Each story is a soloist, or a musical phrase, playing in concert with the other stories, adding up to one big symphony.

This is nothing new, fundamentally. Cinematic language has included the Soviet montage technique of intercutting different scenes with each other for quite some time now, and Cloud Atlas isn't even the first to apply Soviet montage to whole storylines, but nothing of this ambition has been seen for a while now. Certainly, very few works transcend time, location, genre, and social categories like race and gender. And there's no sense of Tykwer or the Wachowskis half-arsing it. They believe completely in what they're doing. That's probably what makes it so endearing.

VI. The Great Thought

I mentioned, way back at the start, that cynicism is increasingly prevalent in our society and culture. This isn't to completely disparage it as an outlook. There are times when we need a trickster looking outward at the world and pointing out what's wrong with it, someone with no illusions. The problem is there are so goddamn many of these people in the world. It can give way to a general sense of misanthropy quite easily. And where does that leave you? With the likes of Bret Easton Ellis or Dave Sim, who find it easy to turn their bile onto something, and that's not good company to keep.

I went down that road once. I never want to go down there again. Cynicism and a jaded perspective are cool and all, it's fun to act superior to something (and also why writing a negative review is easier and often more enjoyable than a glowing one), but man, that can be seriously draining. It's like living on absinthe. I've made no secret about the fact that All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant shaped my belief system, and myself, for the better. In a world that's mostly cruel and chaotic, why would you want more fiction that emphasises that above all else? Not to shun everything dark and serious and weighty altogether, but add a bit more stuff about how good it is to be, well, good.

Cloud Atlas is not a complex thematic work, whatever form the structure takes. The message is very simple: "Doing good is good, doing bad is bad". Some will think it's trite and simplistic, an overtly grandiose, pretentious way of delivering a simple moral lesson. What gives it more weight is that, by mapping out all of human existence over such a broad canvas, Cloud Atlas shows how important altruism and kindness ultimately are. The world is one where power is abused, where those who are weak are routinely preyed upon and devoured. This is true of the natural world, of the concept of "survival of the fittest". So, in a life full of cruelty, the most important thing is to try and be noble.

I can't speak for Tykwer's filmography, but the Wachowskis are very positive filmmakers. The underrated Speed Racer is a big ode to the joys of family, and is shot as a pure kaleidoscope of Technicolor energy intended to get the viewer giddy. The Matrix films are about rejecting a comforting lie in favour of truth, however painful that might be. Even their 1996 effort Bound is about embracing your own identity, and had close involvement from sex-positive feminist Susie Bright, who signed on upon finding the script was full of women enjoying sex without apologising for it. So Cloud Atlas feels right at home with their brand of silly high-concept idealistic filmmaking.

There are moments, yes, when it doesn't completely work, where it falls into camp and is too overstuffed. But an honourable failure is better than a successful mediocrity, and you'll rarely see films as brave and as beautiful as Cloud Atlas.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater