David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is one of my favourite books. Everything about it, from its’ brilliant structure intertwined with overarching themes, to its grand scope spanning centuries, to just the characters and individual narratives themselves I’m utterly in awe of and compelled by (and just a tad jealous of). If you don’t know it, it’s a historical-sci-fi-dramatic-comedy-thriller novel composed as a Matryoshka Doll: with the first halfs of five individual stories succeeding each other, followed by a sixth in its entirety, and then the conclusive halfs of the previous five in reverse order. Each story is set in a different time period, told in a different style and literary genre, and from the point of view of a different character -yet they are linked by certain themes, narrative parallels, and a peculiar birthmark on five of the six protagonists suggesting a reincarnated soul through time. It’s a masterpiece of postmodern literature.
However, unsurprisingly I was introduced to it first through its’ movie adaptation. Written and directed by Lana & Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, 2012’s Cloud Atlas is one of the most significant theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. It was a movie I went into knowing nothing but the clues that had intrigued me from the imagery in the trailer and it was utterly disarming. It was one of the first truly cerebral theatrical experiences I had, as well as one of the most thrilling. I fell in love with the movie and became intent on absorbing more of it, and so I got the book. However it was some time before I actually got around to reading it, in which space my cinephilia evolved in part due to the film, but I also noticed how I was in a minority for liking it. Many critics I trusted highly disliked the film in fact. Some of the criticisms I understood, such as the choice to use yellow-face on a few white actors in one of the storylines; others I didn’t, such as the storylines being hard to follow and convoluted. Once I did finally pick up the book though I began to sympathize with the detractors on at least one count: that the book is vastly superior.
In fact it retroactively frustrated me how the movie, which accurately translated some aspects of the book to perfection, couldn’t do the same with others. The casting is terrific, the visual effects, the worlds, the scale, the cinematography, the music is achingly beautiful …and yet the stories change or leave out major things, key ideas are misunderstood, and the structure is broken down into something far less interesting for admittedly a handful of great transitions and montages.
But then I realize I myself am not being entirely fair, judging Cloud Atlas the movie as an adaptation when that has little to do with whether or not a movie is good. Certainly the book surpasses the movie in preference for me, but perhaps there are points of comparison worth discussing, as well as how the movie handles such themes on its own. After all I did love the movie once without the book as a reference point.
The biggest idea of both versions of Cloud Atlas is the soul and reincarnation across time. In fact it’s the key concept of both novel and film, yet is expressed very differently in each. The soul spanning the book is illustrated through the comet-shaped birthmark of six characters, five of them POV subjects: 19th century San Francisco lawyer Adam Ewing, 1930s Cambridge musical prodigy Robert Frobisher, 1970s Californian investigative journalist Luisa Rey, modern day London publisher Timothy Cavendish, and post 21st century Korean cloned “Fabricant” Sonmi-451, as well as the chief secondary character, Meronym of post-apocalyptic tribesman Zachry’s oral history. These characters at points recall aspects of their past lives -both Timothy and Sonmi experience fleeting deja vu of Luisa being driven off a bridge for instance and even speculate on the idea of reincarnation: Luisa is especially spooked by Frobisher’s reference to his birthmark -which she of course shares, however Timothy finds the implication absurd as he reads the novel of her adventure. Frobisher talks of meeting his lover Sixsmith in another life and Zachry by the end of his tale is convinced that Meronym is the soul of his deity Sonmi. It’s not subtle, which is exactly what it is in the film, complicated by the filmmakers’ choice to cast all the actors in different parts across stories. It confuses the notion of who is a reincarnation of whom. Is Timothy Cavendish Luisa Rey, or is he Vivian Ayrs because they’re both Jim Broadbent? The cues linking the characters who should be one soul are already downplayed or omitted, and the comet is glimpsed only briefly on each of them. Therefore the translation seems to favour the actors themselves as the symbol of individual souls, muddying the concepts’ diversity and meaning as laid down by Mitchell. Souls no longer appear to transcend gender or creed or race (except in one bit of discomfort). It’s a more limited scope to the idea.
And it bleeds into the way the film handles the novel’s great themes on human nature. One of the core tenets that Mitchell has pointed out is predation, how power and prejudice repeatedly see people oppressing each other across ages and geographies, whether in grand scale institutions such as slavery or the industry of bio-engineered servile clones, or in smaller contexts such as a wealthy power company silencing protesters or an authoritarian nursing home mistreating its elderly residents. Its’ most overt forms come not coincidentally in the first and last chronological pieces, as the whites’ genocide on black and Polynesian peoples is equated with the tribes on Hawaii hunting each other. Ewing fears his Maori stowaway Autua will cannibalize him, and lifetimes later the Kona, once part of that “superior” race do exactly that. The dynamic exists in class as well. Sonmi witnesses the horrors inflicted upon Fabricants throughout her journey to enlightenment, she herself is seen as worthless and expendable by the students studying her, culminating in the reveal that the paradisaical eternal life she has been promised is a front for harvesting Fabricants as bio-matter, food, and even the drug they are all dependent on. To a lesser degree, Frobisher experiences some of the realities of poverty when the once aristocratic youth finds himself penniless in Belgium. And work and office sexism is rampant in the everyday life of Luisa, the only female reporter for Spyglass magazine. This theme remains a cornerstone of the film, though a lot of specific examples don’t find their way in. Ultimately they’re made more broad and less intricate, and because it’s less clear this is essentially one character viewing the eternal struggle against oppression over centuries and disallows for curious voices on such matters from characters like Henry Goose and Professor Mephi, it boils down to a simple note on the repetitive patterns of human behaviour.
Thus is the case with freedom from oppression as well. The film hones in on that theme through the three most obviously enslaved characters, Autua, Timothy, and Sonmi, yet the novel is more nuanced. Autua is self-freed, and doesn’t owe all that much to Ewing really, and while Sonmi is physically liberated from Papa Songs’, her psychological liberation is entirely her own -thus how she comes to believe in the principles of freedom despite knowing it was all a ruse to make her a public scapegoat. In essence, she was never actually freed at all, only her mind was. This side of her journey (as well as a number of other aspects of it) are eliminated from the movie to make her a more literal freedom fighter, though still something of a tool of the resistance, which the film only seems to be half-conscious of. Autua’s freedom, though not facilitated by Ewing, is shadowed by a white saviour moment late in the film. Only Timothy’s escape from Aurora House with his cohorts remains the self-fulfilled liberation it is in the book -which also contains subtler freedoms in the stories of Frobisher, Luisa, and Zachry: Frobisher in his unstifled creative freedom upon escaping Zedelghem Chateau (bizarrely relocated to Scotland in the film) -the cost of which he’s ill-equipped to deal with, Luisa in escaping the constraints of her divorce and her fathers’ reputation, and Zachry freeing himself of the xenophobic customs of his people consolidated in the spectre of Old Georgie.
To someone familiar with Christian doctrine, the scenes between Zachry and this haunting figure in both book and film are an obvious allusion to the temptation of Jesus in the desert by Satan. The film especially emphasizes this dichotomy. And though Zachry is no saviour, except in the sense of continuing his people’s lineage after they’re destroyed by the Kona, he does resemble Christ in his ultimately choosing the way of his goddess Sonmi over this devil -though in a palpable Last Temptation sort of way. His devotion to Sonmi is a major part of his story in particular, but it and the other faith-based notions of the book don’t have a role in the film. Significantly, it’s one of the things that connects Zachry to his oldest in-book predecessor, Ewing -who also is characterized as a pious Christian. And Ewing is confronted with the ugliness that is made of his religion as a major component of his growth when at a mission called Bethlehem on Raiatea. The Reverend Horrox uses his faith as the template for his ridiculous theory of racial hierarchy contrasting with the pastor D’Arnoq, whom Ewing had met at the start of his voyage on the Chatham Islands -an abolitionist who had helped Autua stow away and whom Ewing didn’t think much of at the time. These alternating depictions of the faithful and how they shape faith and the future recurs through the book in Frobisher’s hated preacher father, Timothy’s kindly but unreliable Aurora House vicar, the outcast colonists of Nea So Copros and their tranquil reverent Buddhism, and of course the worship of Sonmi by the post-Fall Hawaiian islanders -a monotheism Zachry’s people think highly of next to the polytheism of other tribes. It is an interesting contrast that though the book illustrates faith often as a negative or suppressive force, faithful figures who remain such like Ewing and Zachry make some of the most important choices in the book for future generations. The movie simply has no comment on the matter of faith except as a validation of Sonmi’s Catechisms.
What takes the place of a lot of these ideas in the movie, or at least their significance to the whole, is the Wachowskis and Tykwers’ focus on love. The endings to almost every story are altered to emphasize this notion: a point is made of Ewing’s wife supporting him in standing up to her father, Frobishers’ body is cradled by his beloved Sixsmith, Timothy out of nowhere reunites with his teenage sweetheart, and Zachry and Meronym are seen as an old married couple. Notably, romances between Frobisher and Sixsmith and Sonmi and Hae-Joo are made prominent, where in the book the former was largely a past-tense love affair and the latter a little sexual tension culminating in one instance of lovemaking. The book isn’t without love stories necessarily, they’re just often in the background. Ewing’s love for his wife and son show though in his journal, though Timothy’s lost love was mostly nostalgia for lost youth and Sonmi in her discovery of new concepts and sensations merely wanted to experience sex. However Zachry’s affection for Meronym certainly blossoms into a kind of love, and the movies’ ending for them is somewhat implied by the book. Frobisher has the most significant intersection with this theme, though not with Sixsmith but Ayrs’ stepdaughter Eva, whose mother he was also sleeping with. He opines of his love for her in that bohemian romanticism of that era late in his story, but it doesn’t end well. Music is ultimately his greatest love.
But while the Cloud Atlas Sextet may only be a driving force in his story, the integral role of art transcends all of them, and perhaps this is what drew the Wachowskis and Tykwer to the book in the first place. Storytelling is a key facet of Cloud Atlas as it draws these narratives reverberating through time. Each protagonist is impacted by the tale of their predecessor. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing transfixes Frobisher, the Letters from Zedelghem compel Luisa, Half-Lives proves a healthy distraction for Timothy, and then they take on even greater roles. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish deeply inspires Sonmi and the Orison of Sonmi-451 becomes the basis of a great historical text for the Prescients and an entire faith for Zachry’s islanders. The book particularly notes the profound power the Cloud Atlas Sextet has on Luisa and the movie of Timothy’s story has on Sonmi. Storytelling shapes Sonmi, as much of her ascension is brought about by her absorbing historical texts and philosophies, much as music is a key component of Frobishers’ identity, frequently thinking in those terms and with references to favourite compositions. And even Timothy, in the telling of his story, demonstrates a very keen eye for cinematic language. Tykwer and the Wachowskis of course, share that eye, and therefore it’s no wonder they would link art and life even more intricately in their film. It’s the main reason they reconstructed the story to begin with. In-text there’s not a terribly heavier focus on works of art than in the book, barring a seeming flashback within Frobisher’s narrative where he and Sixsmith rebelliously destroy a collection of antiques; but out-of-text, well, this scene is rendered beautifully. The filmmakers see visual artistry as a way of enhancing the emotional tethers binding these six stories. The film has a number of instances of evocative or lush imagery, some of which only come from moments being glimpsed side-by-side through montage or blatant parallel. It’s what clearly in their eyes justifies the change in structure, and I honestly can’t blame them for it. The Wachowskis especially have a compulsion towards provocative illustrations of their ideas, and you can tell they had a field day on this film. Add to that a score composed by Tykwer, Reinhold Heil, and Johnny Klimek, which richly captures all the feelings of Cloud Atlas, both book and film, the grandiose and the sensitive, that is all-around one of the best movie scores I’ve ever come across. These choices to marry the themes and ideas of Cloud Atlas with vivid artistry, enhancing the operatic nature of the piece, may have doomed the film in a way; as in the less highly stylized edits and contrasts, it’s not easy to follow the individual stories when there are so many gaps between successive events and you’re unable to really connect with any of the characters before being spirited to different ones. Indeed, I don’t think it works, and yet I wouldn’t give up those breathtaking moments.
Nor would I disparage filmmakers like the Wachowskis from putting open LGBTQ content into a big-budget high-concept mainstream film. As much as it may irk the book fan in me that Frobishers’ story in the film becomes all about his sexuality, the romance between him and Sixsmith is really nice in the film, and through its visual expression allows the touching moment of Frobisher spotting Sixsmith at the monument to be even more sweet. Likewise there is something moving in the filmmakers’ notion of soulmates, that Tom Hanks and Halle Berry fall for each other in multiple lives, as do Doona Bae in Jim Sturgess. It imparts this classical romantic idea of love as eternal, unconstrained by time, environment, or sexual preference -something which I understand this same creative team explored further in Sense8. Maybe it was a missing ingredient of the book to not connect love the same way it does souls.
Likewise, perhaps there’s more to the films’ absence of faith, or at least as I first perceived it. Religiosity may not appear (in perhaps an atheistic statement on its irrelevance for the soul), but faith in one another is clearly apparent. Sure, faith is misplaced, as Ewings’ is with Goose (a more believable friendship is established in the book) or Timothy’s is with his brother Denholme, but it is also rewarded in the trust Sonmi places in Hae-Joo to rescue her and Zachry does in Meronym to save his niece and Sixsmith does in Luisa to expose the truth. Faith in a god is replaced by faith in humanity and the human spirit, and its capacity to do good and find peace in the world -if not for ourselves then for our future. Luisa has it, as does Zachry, as does Sonmi, as does Frobisher in a roundabout way. And that certainly aligns with Mitchell’s meditations on the endurance of human goodness.
It’s a necessary optimism amidst all the pessimism that fills out the history-repeating-itself truism of Cloud Atlas. The idea that there will always be those to do what’s right. Ewing notes “torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword”, but also that the fight is worth it. And where the film is concerned, freedom movements are of course nothing new for the Wachowskis, which is no doubt why Sonmi’s story feels so familiar in aesthetic and focus to The Matrix trilogy, Japanese cyberpunk, or even Blade Runner. And yet, for as dramatic as it is, it’s no more symbolically important than the fight of the ill-treated elders at Aurora House or Zachry’s defence against the Kona. They are all underdogs being abused, preyed upon, or vilified. As upsetting as it is that Autua’s struggle with Goose (a microcosm of the strangulation of slavery) depends on the interference of a white man, the caricature-like features of the tormentor and desperation of his victim is a potent image of white supremacy. There is beauty in freedom, in that gorgeous shot of Autua tending to Ewing, in Zachry looking up at the stars from a new world, even in Frobisher on the Scott Monument out from Ayrs’ thumb and Timothy and his friends joyfully breaking down the gate of Aurora House. That is why the filmmakers left out the manipulation of Sonmi’s entire ascension. They believe too much in her need to be physically as well as mentally free and to die for an immediate cause, as derivative as it may be. They need her to be a genuine symbol of freedom in the face of oppression.
The face of oppression through just about all of the stories is Hugo Weaving, and I rather like that touch too. He is the old world slaver, the ruthless indiscriminate assassin, the Nurse Ratched wannabe, the corpocratic overlord, and the corrupting devil. Though the contexts may change through time and place, the face of evil is always the same -Weaving is never disguised to the degree some of the other actors are. Through him the film effectively illustrates that predation theme Mitchell stressed, especially in the three stories where he most actively takes on that role. And though sexism and racism past the Ewing story hardly factor into the film at all, prejudice in the form of age, class, status, and sexuality are seen as the barriers of progress that they are. It’s heavy-handed when Luisa asks “why do we keep making the same mistakes?” but it is a question worth asking. The film shows Zachry surviving through his act of kindness towards Meronym where Frobisher’s death resulted from a lack of that kindness (him killing Ayrs certainly undercuts some of that though -an awful creative choice). And in those key relationships: Zachry and Meronym and Sonmi and Hae Joo, we see the theme on the virtues of loving the other -even Adam and Tilda Ewing are suggested to be from different social stratas.
Earlier I referred to the films’ treatment of souls as limited, and that isn’t entirely fair. Because the movies’ soulmate concept does also favour the idea of differences being drawn to one another and that they were cosmically meant to be. Even the interpretation of souls being connected by actors presents the fascinating idea that we are different people in different lives. Those with the comet, though distinct, do have fundamental similarities in ideals, moralities, and goals that aren’t shared by say Isaac Sachs and Dermot Hoggins. It would imply each soul has the capacity for a variety of tendencies and this makes the grand metaphysical atlas a more complex tapestry. There is something innately compelling to that: multiple souls crossing each other in different lives as opposed to a single one witnessing and acting within the patterns of humanity over generations. A line written for the movie sums up its thesis here: “Our lives are not our own; from womb to tomb we are bound to others past and present, and by each crime and every kindness we birth our future.” It emphatically accentuates collectivism, that of individuals and of souls in determining the fate of the future. It’s a poignant and noble statement if not the actual one of Cloud Atlas. What makes that final line from Ewing and the whole book itself so moving to me is its individualism: that the actions of one person, one soul, can ripple even in “a limitless ocean”. Yes, the multitude is important, the collective bringing about of change, but singular actions are too -they contribute to the whole, not merely existing as a part of it. The Wachowskis and Tykwer see the ocean, Mitchell sees the drop, and neither perspective is right or wrong. Fundamentally the movie is merely the filmmakers’ ideas of the soul up against Mitchell’s, and an attempt to reconcile the two that never quite succeeds. Had the novel’s structure been kept (and they found a wiser way around the Nea So Copros story that didn’t involve uncomfortable whitewashing) the two may have coalesced better.
Really, that is what the movie is: a series of very strong conceptual ideas that are individually terrific, but don’t work well together. Even just the nixing of one element, the actors in multiple roles or the chopped up structure would have made for a stronger film. But then it was always a difficult task. Cloud Atlas, a book on the universality of the human experience, was thought unfilmmable -and perhaps it is. I don’t wholly like the resulting three hour attempt at a rebuttal, but I certainly admire the effort, and enough individual components to still enjoy it modestly. Though I guess I never will love it the way I did when I first saw it. The book has so shaped my relationship to the text that you might have noticed I even replicated its structural pattern for this essay.
There’s a meta comment in-book that each of the stories is unreliable or possibly fiction entirely: authorial subjectivity or logistical errors that bring into question the validity of the piece each subsequent character is relating to. Yet this only strengthens the immortality of the storytelling, because the essential truth remains intact regardless of whether the Half-Lives novel is a bit cliché or Zachry is exaggerating parts of his campfire tale. The movie Cloud Atlas is also an imperfect vehicle for that truth, an adaptation that itself might feel right at home nested within the book. It has entered it’s own grand narrative and who can say what impact it will have. I mean, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish wasn’t that great a movie either.
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