Cloud Atlas offers language lesson
Movies are a visual medium: They rely on the force of images and stories. But the language that conveys those stories seldom ranks among the most important elements of a film. “There are certain tools you use,” according to the great director Martin Scorsese, “and those tools become part of a vocabulary that is just as valid as the vocabulary that is used in literature.” Scorsese is a proponent of “visual literacy,” meaning that the style in which a director and a cinematographer shoot a movie is just as critical as the style in which an author writes a novel. That being the case, what happens when a novel that revolves around language becomes a lavish motion picture?
For an answer, watch Cloud Atlas. Released this fall to mixed reviews and disappointing box-office returns, it’s a brave effort to transform a major novel into a major film. Even though the result lasts for more than 160 minutes, large chunks of the original plot had to be simplified or eliminated. That’s inevitable: David Mitchell’s novel needed all of its 544 pages to tell a hugely complex set of stories set in six time periods ranging from the 19th century to the distant future. Overall, the choices made by the movie’s writers and directors, Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings, are not just defensible but smart.
They’re not miracle workers, though. And where the film falls desperately short of the novel’s power is in the two sections set in the future. The main reason involves language.
Those sections aren’t easy to read. One of them takes place in a Korea of the 22nd century that mixes capitalist extravagance with totalitarian control. The main character, Sonmi-451, is a rebel clone or “fabricant:” a piece of organic machinery grown in a “wombtank” and given human form, thereby becoming a synthetic slave. In both the book and the movie, her revolt against tyranny is central to Cloud Atlas’s interlocking themes of freedom and betrayal. But in the novel, Sonmi-451 says things like this: “The amnesiacs in my Soapsac were reduced … and ascension catalysts instreamed.” In the fast-food restaurant where she works, fabricants “input orders, tray food, vend drinks, upstock condiments.” Humans in her society breathe oxygen provided by AirCorp and engage in sex provided by PimpCorp. Degradation is embodied in words.
Little of Mitchell’s brilliant distortion of language comes through in the film. The script manipulates everyday speech just enough to make the futuristic story plausible (“If you wanted I could digi it”). But whereas a reader of the novel is constantly forced to think about words — prostitutes, for example, are “comforters,” an echo of how the Japanese military used Koreans as “comfort women” in the Second World War — viewers of the movie have no time for this. The action rushes by so fast, it’s impossible to dwell on language.
Even harder to convey on film is the rhetoric of the novel’s central section, set on a tropical island long after an apocalypse has poisoned the planet and wiped out most of the human race. The narrator, Zach’ry, says things like: “Snailysome goin’ was them rockfields, yay, jus’brush that rock light an’ your fingers’d bleed fast and wetly ... Fiercesome he speaked at me.” The fallen language challenges a reader just as the rough conditions of daily life challenge Zach’ry. To their credit, the filmmakers make an effort to replicate this discomfort for their startled audience. In the movie’s opening scene, Zach’ry says “more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryn” and “lemme yarn you ’bout the first time we met.” But the result comes across as a kind of strange regional dialect. What’s missing is Mitchell’s sense of a warped, truncated language that mirrors the struggles of Zach’ry’s tribe. They don’t know what hit their ancestors, and their words as well as their deeds are maimed.
The movie version of Cloud Atlas does some things tremendously well. It finds compelling images for the disturbing future. What it can’t do is capture more than a rare hint of the meanings of language in the novel. In the way his stories move — “progress” would be entirely the wrong word — from century to century, Mitchell shows that the way we speak encapsulates who we are. Language can be destiny.