"I Thought I Was Alone": Thoughts on Sense8

You could probably run an interesting poll among genre fans to see which ones find the elevator-pitch description for Netflix's new show Sense8--a globe-spanning genre series from the minds of the Wachowski siblings and J. Michael Straczynski--an immediate selling point, and which ones see it as a reason to stay away.  I have to admit that I'm in the latter group. The involvement of the Wachowskis, whose recent work has vacillated between glorious messes (Cloud Atlas) and tedious ones (Jupiter Ascending) was cause for some concern, if also no small amount of curiosity.  But Straczynski, best-known for the formally innovative but cliché-ridden and self-satisfied Babylon 5, gave me some genuine pause.  It was some time before I could bring myself to get past my expectation of long-winded speeches and juvenile cod-philosophy and give the show a try.  I can't exactly say that Sense8 defied these lowered expectations.  It is a mess, and it is cliché-ridden.  But it's also not at all the sort of show I would have expected from Straczynski (whose input into the show's plot and central ideas is actually quite hard to discern) or even the Wachowskis (whose frequent preoccupations, for example from Cloud Atlas, appear here, but in very different ways than what I'm used to seeing from them).  Sense8 isn't exactly a good show, but it is an interesting and unusual one, and in ways that make it extremely worth watching.

Sense8 focuses on eight characters: Will, a Chicago cop (Brian J. Smith); Nomi, a transgender blogger and hacktivist in San Francisco (Jamie Clayton); Lito, a closeted matinee idol in Mexico City (Miguel Ángel Silvestre); Capheus, a bus driver from a Nairobi slum (Aml Ameen); Sun, a Korean businesswoman who moonlights in Seoul's underground boxing scene (Doona Bae); Kala, a chemist from Mumbai (Tina Desai); Wolfgang, a German criminal (Max Riemelt); and Riley, an Icelandic DJ working in London (Tuppence Middleton).  As the series opens, they begin to experience shared dreams and hallucinations, and to feel each other's emotions and physical sensations.  A mysterious stranger called Jonas (Naveen Andrews) informs them that they are a "sensate cluster"--eight individuals who are part of a single self, an alternate form of humanity that has existed, hidden, for millennia.  The discovery of their shared connection both interferes and aids in the various dramas going on in the characters' lives--Kala is conflicted about her upcoming marriage to a rich man whom she doesn't love; Capheus is desperate to get money with which to buy medicine for his HIV-positive mother; Sun is being pressured by her father and brother to take responsibility for the latter's embezzlement in order to save the family business.  At the same time, the cluster's awakening draws the attention of a sinister figure known as Whispers (Terrence Mann), who, aided by the authorities, seeks to hunt them down and subject them to personality-destroying brain surgery.

While watching Sense8, I found myself comparing it to Orphan Black, another present-set technothriller about a group of disparate strangers who are forced to band together due to a quirk of their biology.  The two shows share a slapdash approach to plotting, and a tendency to rely on broad stereotypes when drawing their main characters (of course Capheus's mother has HIV; of course Sun is a martial arts expert).  They also share the choice to build their storytelling around a central gimmick.  On Orphan Black, this is the fact that most of the show's characters are played by the same actress, who often performs opposite herself--an intimate device, whose success is measured by its failure to call attention to itself (how many times in the show's recently concluded season have I caught myself thinking "wow, Sarah really reminded me of Alison in that scene"?).  Sense8, on the other hand, goes large.  Its defining gimmick is the rapid intercutting between several vividly and beautifully shot locations (the show was filmed in Chicago, San Francisco, London, Reykjavik, Nairobi, Seoul, Mumbai, Berlin, and Mexico City, with different directors--including the Wachowskis and their Cloud Atlas collaborator Tom Tykwer--taking over directing duties in each location).

The logistics of this project were obviously enormously complex--because the connection between the characters allows them to appear to each other and even take over each other's bodies, the entire cast had to be present in each location, and many scenes had to be shot multiple times with different actors playing the lead each time.  As it is on Orphan Black, however, the result is more than just an impressive technical accomplishment.  The visual device at the heart of Sense8 helps to drive home the show's central theme of interconnectedness.  Its shifting between multiple, gorgeous locations contributes to the epic feeling of the story (even as the story itself lags in validating such pretensions).  Whatever else it is, Sense8 is never boring to watch.

It is perhaps for this reason that the weakness of Sense8's plot(s) doesn't really register.  None of the individual characters' stories are particularly engrossing in themselves, and some are barely stories at all--Kala, for example, could call off her wedding in an instant; the only reason she doesn't is an increasingly inexplicable unwillingness to hurt her fiancé's feelings and disappoint her ecstatic but ultimately supportive family.  Meanwhile, the thriller plot that surrounds Whispers's pursuit of the cluster is barely developed, even by the end of the first season's twelve hours.  (One of the few Straczynski-esque touches to the show is that he has announced that he has a five-year plan for the story, with the final episode already mapped out, perhaps explaining the first season's slowness.  This should also give prospective viewers pause, given how lukewarm the show's critical and commercial reception has been.  Netflix might give Sense8 a second season, but there's no way it'll give it another four.)  A season into the show, it's hard to say that very much has happened on it, for all its frenetic switching between storylines and repeated reaching for a sense of grandeur and portent.

And yet, Sense8 remains one of the most effortlessly watchable shows I've seen in a while, its twelve hours passing almost in a flash.  (It's interesting, for example, to contrast the show with Daredevil, whose plot problems were comparatively negligible, but whose final episodes were nevertheless a slog in comparison.)  The reason for this is clear--it's not just that if any one plotline bores you, another is sure to cut in, but that the characters from the different plotlines are constantly interfering with each other in unexpected and frequently amusing ways, involving, for example, Wolfgang's crime drama with Kala's domestic dilemma and Lito's identity crisis.  And, of course, if none of those can hold your interests, there's always a gunfight, a dance number, a car chase, a karaoke performance, or several very explicit (but decidedly non-prurient) sex scenes to look forward to.

Again like Orphan Black, Sense8 pretends to be about issues of personhood and identity, but doesn't really have much to say about them.  Just as it isn't actually believable that all of Tatiana Maslany's characters have exactly the same genetic potential, we never really buy that all of Sense8's leads are part of the same person.  (This, incidentally, makes it easier to accept that four of the cluster's members--Wolfgang and Kala, and Will and Riley--become romantic couples, which we'd otherwise have to read as not much different from masturbation.)  And just as Orphan Black uses an SFnal trope that it isn't really interested in to reflect on the issues that are at its heart--namely, female bodily autonomy and the way that it is often violated by scientific, government, and military interests--Sense8 uses the connection between its characters to reflect not on unity, but on empathy.

Being linked to one another doesn't mean that the cluster immediately knows everything about each other (in fact the season's only completed throughline involves getting to the bottom of the trauma that has left Riley so fragile and prone to self-harm).  Rather, it gives them the opportunity to get to know one another, despite their different circumstances and the distances separating them.  The best scenes in the series are the ones in which the characters simply sit and talk about their lives and histories, and through that talking, discover new things about themselves--when Nomi explains to Lito how she found the courage to be true to herself, or when Capheus helps Sun choose whether to sacrifice herself for her family.  The sensate connection becomes a metaphor for the power of empathy, kindness, and open-mindedness to overcome barriers of language, nationality, and geography, and to allow people--some of whom are disadvantaged by gender, race, sexuality, or class--to help each other, pooling their strengths, skills, and advantages and becoming a more resilient whole.  "I thought I was alone," Riley says to Sun, and this is clearly true of all the show's characters.  But together, they find companionship and solace even in their darkest, loneliest moments.

The only problem with this message is that you don't really need to watch twelve hours of Sense8 to grasp it.  That this is what the show is driving at is obvious already from its trailer, or a random gifset on tumblr.  What the show amounts to, then, is a lot of embroidering around this theme, not all of which serves it well.  It's one thing, for example, for Jonas to tell Will that ordinary humans' lack of connection makes them better killers, but when Capheus calls on Sun's help when one gangster is about to force him to kill another gangster, and she coolly slices her way through a dozen of the first gangster's henchmen, the show's messages can start to seem a little mixed.  And though the show clearly has a commitment to issues of social justice, and particularly the positive representation of queer characters and relationships, it also has some odd blind spots--as when Will, a white man, saves the life of a black teenage criminal, only to have his partner, a nurse, and a retired cop, all of whom are people of color, express the belief that doing so was wrong because the boy might grow up to kill cops.  Or the subplot in which Lito and his boyfriend Hernando's (Alfonso Herrera) life is invaded by Lito's unwitting beard Daniela (Eréndira Ibarra), who first sexually harasses Lito, and then, when she finds out about Hernando, immediately assumes that he and Lito are her new gay BFFs, exclaiming "I love gay porn!" and taking illicit pictures of them having sex, all of which is treated as cute rather than offensive and invasive.

Despite its forays into clichés and offensive tropes, one of the things that helps sell Sense8 as an exploration of interconnectedness and empathy is the breadth of its world.  The show is set in eight different countries and cultures, and though obviously I can't say how true any of its depictions of those cultures are (and in fact I suspect, given how frequently it plumps for stereotypes, that these depictions are flawed at best), what does ring true is the sense of their difference from each other, and from what we're used to seeing on American TV.  To watch Sense8 is to gain a greater appreciation for how narrow the cultural landscape that appears in most anglophone entertainment actually is--especially when those entertainments depict non-anglophone cultures.  How many other shows, for example, would set a scene in the Diego Rivera museum, the better for their characters to explain to each other Rivera's Marxist sympathies, and how these were betrayed by subsequent generations looking to monetize his heritage?  How many acknowledge the existence of streams of Christianity such as Russian Orthodoxy, Wolfgang's religion, or are capable of imagining an intersection of faith, secularism, and religious fanaticism that is completely different from how those forces interact in American culture, as Sense8 does in Kala's storyline?

There's certainly room to criticize Sense8--as others have already done--for fictionalizing its settings, and for often remaining trapped in a stereotypical, American perspective on them.  But to me that criticism is incomplete.  It ignores the fact that, alongside some obvious stereotypes, many scenes in Sense8 feature cultural touchstones that are obvious to the characters and to other people from their culture, but opaque to us.  When we flash back to Lito's birth, we see his family crowded around the TV watching a soap opera.  Nomi and her girlfriend Amanita (Freema Agyeman) attend a dance/spoken word performance about the ravages of the AIDS crisis.  Wolfgang meets a buyer for his stolen diamonds in a maze of concrete columns.  It's left to the observant or obsessive viewer to work out that these are, respectively, the finale of Cuna de Lobos, the most successful soap opera on Mexican TV, a real performance piece by Sean Dorsey, and the Berlin Holocaust memorial.  Even a viewer who doesn't pick up on these details, however, will take away from Sense8 the message that not everyone's cultural landscape looks the way it does on American TV.  That other historical events, religious observances, and cultural milestones might loom largest for people from other parts of the globe.

If you take a look at the current state of genre TV--almost all of which is dominated by superheroes or stories that don't veer very far from that template--a dispiriting picture begins to emerge.  Thoughtless power fantasies abound.  Stories that are supposedly about justice and protecting the weak only lightly conceal a might-is-right message.  Agents of SHIELD took a premise that could have been used to reflect on the seductiveness of ungoverned, unaccountable power and the ease with which it is abused, and turned it into a ratification of the fascist worldview.  The main character of the supposedly sunny and grimdark-free The Flash illegally imprisons the people he defeats without trial, legal recourse, or any hope of release, and his only comeuppance is to be praised for not killing them outright.  In this climate, Sense8, for all its flaws, feels utterly essential.  For a genre story to center empathy, compassion, and understanding, even in ways that are imperfect, is almost revolutionary.  So while Sense8, as I've said, isn't exactly good TV, it's so different--and in ways that so sharply reveal the shortcomings of our current genre landscape--that I have no hesitation in recommending it.  It's not surprising that the show hasn't enjoyed the critical and commercial success that Daredevil has, but, precisely because it acts as a counterpoint to so many of the Marvel show's thoughtless assumptions, I hope that it's granted a second season.

Jupiter Ascending

It's been less than a year since Tasha Robinson coined the phrase "Trinity syndrome," and yet it's already become one of the most useful terms in pop culture criticism.  Named for the female lead in Lana and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix, Trinity syndrome refers to a movie in which a female character is depicted as cool, competent, and badass, but always and inexplicably in the service of a much blander male lead (for whom she is usually the love interest).  She often loses her motivation (if she ever had one) and her ability to affect the plot in the film's final act, just in time for the lead to take center stage, and often needs to be rescued by him.  As Hollywood blockbusters become more conservative in their structures and plots, the roles they give women become more constrained, and Trinity syndrome has become a useful way of examining how the appearance of agency can obscure its absence.  Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowskis' most recent film and their first return to no-holds-barred SF since the second Matrix sequel, offers an interesting data point in the discussion of the phenomenon to which they gave a name.  Of all its many flaws, perhaps the most crucial is that Jupiter Ascending does not suffer from Trinity syndrome.

Perhaps the easiest way to sum up Jupiter Ascending is to describe it as a gender-swapped, space opera retelling of The Matrix.  In both films, you have a somewhat personality-free protagonist dissatisfied with their humdrum, monotonous life who discovers that they were born special, a savior figure awaited for generations.  Whisked off to a life of adventure by a sexy, uber-competent bodyguard, they discover that the truths about the world that they'd taken for granted are nothing but illusions, and that human beings are being exploited by a sinister system that sees them as nothing but fuel for a great machine--an exploitation that only our hero can bring an end to.

What's interesting about this repetition is how it reveals the ways in which telling the same story with a different-gendered protagonist affects the kind of tale you end up telling.  In The Matrix, the fact that Neo was such a blank--devoid of past, family, relationships, or even any concrete dreams or aspirations--wasn't a problem because that blankness allowed the other characters to explain the world to him and the audience to project themselves onto him (in fact one assumes that the reason the Wachowskis chose Keanu Reeves for the role was his infamous lack of affect).  That passivity, however, was counteracted by the type of special person Neo turned out to be.  His journey from no-one to The One required him to discover skills and ultimately ascend to godhood.  As passive as he was, the role in which the story placed him was an essentially active one, and his passivity was expressed by his acquiescence to this active role.  But if Neo gets to live out the fantasy of a nobody who discovers that he is actually supremely powerful, Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) gets to live out the girl's version of that fantasy.  He's a warrior; she's a princess.  His specialness expresses itself in his ability to do things that no one else can; hers, in the fact that she owns a lot of stuff--as the reincarnation of the matriarch of one of the richest dynasties in the galaxy, she owns whole planets (including Earth) and their populations.  All Jupiter has to do to be special is keep breathing long enough to officially claim her inheritance--at which point the greatest danger to her (and the rest of the world) becomes that she might accidentally marry the wrong person and give them access to her property.

Jupiter spends the film that bears her name being moved from place to place--and sometimes physically tossed around like a rag doll--by the alien bounty hunter Caine (Channing Tatum), who tries to keep her safe from the various factions in her newfound family who want to control or kill her.  There's been some talk about how Caine embodies the romantic fantasies of a certain genre of bodice-rippers--endlessly loyal, his fearsome strength completely in thrall to Jupiter's needs, and constantly on display (the entire middle segment of the film, for example, finds some pretty flimsy excuses to keep him topless).  He cuts a much more subservient figure than Trinity, right down to being explicitly likened to a dog, but then that too feels like a function of his gender--Caine being a man reduces the insecurity inherent in his role, and makes it safe for him to be subservient to Jupiter. 

What undercuts Jupiter Ascending as female wish fulfillment is the fact that, unlike the bland male protagonists who benefit from Trinity syndrome, Jupiter never develops into the central character in her own story.  Caine is, in fact, a more developed character than she is (I'm speaking in relative terms, of course), with something resembling a character arc revolving around his need to find a "pack," which Jupiter comes to embody, and to regain his honor and sense of purpose.  Jupiter, meanwhile, has little in the way of a discernible personality.  We're repeatedly told that she's cynical and distrusting, but the actual character who turns up on screen is shockingly naive, willing to be led by anyone who acts like they know what they're doing.  This is a character, after all, who allows her cousin to convince her to sell her eggs and give him the bulk of her payment.  A character who agrees to marry one of the super-rich space siblings whom she has dispossessed by claiming her inheritance, simply because he has promised to use her wealth for good, and despite the fact that Douglas Booth plays him with such slimy untrustworthiness that one almost expects him to make sneering asides to the audience that start with "little does she suspect..."

In the Matrix's final act, Trinity is taken suddenly off the board, leaving Neo without his protector, which forces him to suddenly discover his own awesome powers.  Her role immediately becomes a moral one, to inspire Neo to discover his own innate greatness, rather than being great herself--the very fact that she loves him becomes evidence of his incipient godhood.  If the Wachowskis were determined to retell their most successful story beat by beat, we'd expect Caine to be similarly sidelined in Jupiter Ascending's final scenes, but instead the film remains focused on him as its action hero and the mover of its plot--even taking a moment to have another character, Nikki Amuka-Bird's stalwart spaceship captain, compliment him on his "rare courage."  Jupiter, meanwhile, gets to land a few blows against her chief enemy Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne, proving himself worthy of the Oscar he received last night for his performance in another movie by fully committing to the cheesiness of this one), but since his power is rooted in his wealth, the fact that she can knock him to the ground when all his flunkies and security guards aren't around (which is down to Caine's actions) isn't terribly impressive.  She still ends up having to be rescued, and the only way in which she is less passive at the end of the film than she was in its beginning is her willingness to express her sexual desire for Caine.  The problem here isn't so much that Jupiter can't beat people up, which after all isn't the only hallmark of a hero, but that unlike Neo, she doesn't undergo any sort of transformation or inner change--in fact her journey leads her back to the exact same life she had at the film's beginning, except with a cute alien boyfriend.  Even the two films' parallel closing scenes, in which the protagonists zip through the sky, feel deeply gendered--Neo flies on his own power; Jupiter flies because Caine has lent her his jetpack boots.

But then, maybe this all has a lot less to do with gender than it does with capitalism.  Another way to express the difference between Neo and Jupiter is that he is unsatisfied with his life because he wants to do things, whereas she is unsatisfied with her life because she wants to have things.  An illegal immigrant who works all hours of the day as a housecleaner, Jupiter spends the film's early scenes lusting after the designer dresses and expensive jewelry she finds in the homes of her rich clients.  That the wish-fulfillment fantasy that the Wachowskis spin around her involves being the richest person in the galaxy is therefore unsurprising, as is the form of the exploitation she discovers.  The reason that Earth is such a valuable resource, we learn, is that its population can be harvested and converted into a goo that elites like Jupiter and the Abrasax family use to restore their youth and health, essentially living forever.  The same imagery that, in The Matrix, was used as a metaphor for the crushing power of conformity, is here used to symbolize the predatory nature of hyper-capitalism, with culled humans floating unconscious in tanks, and referred to as cattle and crops.

There's obviously space here to tell an engaging story about privilege and wealth.  For Jupiter, a poor person from what turns out to be a poor planet, to find herself instantly elevated to unimaginable privilege, and just as quickly discover that it is founded, literally, in blood, has a lot of potential.  The film's repeated insistence that Jupiter is cynical makes more sense when you realize that she's supposed to have been hardened by poverty, and a life that seemed to offer no hope of anything better.  It could have been interesting to see her struggle with her desire for wealth and her disgust at what it means--though again, that would require the film to be a lot more interested in Jupiter as a person than it actually is.  But as the saying goes, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.  Neo can be a hero in the story of The Matrix because the system he's rebelling against represents something relatively simple, sterile modern living.  Jupiter has to rebel against something much more pernicious--even within the film's ridiculous worldbuilding it's hard to imagine how she could end the system by which billions are culled so that an elite few could live forever.  Is it any surprise, therefore, that she doesn't even try?  That her triumph is the result of relying not just on Caine, but on the very legal authorities that prop up the corrupt system that so horrifies her? 

Jupiter's one moment of moral triumph--the one moment in which she does something to actually justify being the protagonist of her own story--is when she refuses to buy her life from Balem by giving him Earth, knowing that if he kills her he still won't have title to the planet.  It's a heroic moment--though again, it's worth noting that the most heroic thing Jupiter does in her whole story is to agree to do nothing and die--but unlike killer AIs, we know that capitalism doesn't play by the rules.  The film's ending, in which Jupiter goes back to her life on Earth, secure in the belief that no power in the galaxy will touch the precious resource simply because the person who owns it has refused to exploit it, is far less believable than Neo's ability to manipulate space and time in the Matrix.  The Wachowskis clearly intended Jupiter Ascending to be the opening chapter in another series, but I think the fact that, unlike in The Matrix, they couldn't hand their heroine a genuine accomplishment with which to close the opening chapter says a lot about the differences between the two stories.  Killing Agent Smith strikes a meaningful blow against the Matrix.  Killing Balem Abrasax doesn't even ding the system that gave him his power.

There are other reasons why Jupiter Ascending isn't as successful as The Matrix--the lackluster action scenes, the near-total lack of humor, the deadening seriousness with which the film takes its baroque worldbuilding--and, at the same time, it's only fair to note that despite all these flaws, I didn't find it a torture to watch.  It certainly isn't good, but it isn't the sort of slog that, say, The Matrix Revolutions was.  And while it doesn't approach the heights of zany ridiculousness that the Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas achieved, there's a certain loopy charm to its overstuffed plot and its constant shifts between ever-more elaborate locations, that makes it rather easy to get through.  But it's heartbreaking to see a Wachowski film that is so similar to The Matrix, and yet falls so far from its accomplishments.  It's even sadder to realize that at least part of the reason for that difference in quality is the Wachowskis' limits--that the sort of stories they tell about women, and poor women in particular, are so much less exciting and adventurous than the ones they tell about disaffected middle class men.

Recent Movie Roundup 17

'Tis the season for lots and lots of interesting movies to finally make their way to the movie theater, and for me to glut myself in preparation for the long hot months of box-office friendly summer.  Weirdly, though, almost every film I've watched recently has been a lush, visually adventurous and not entirely successful novel adaptation.  Must be something in the water.  There are some more straightforward films coming up (Argo, The Silver Linings Playbook, Flight, though also fare like Les Miserables and Holy Motors), but for the time being here are my thoughts on this strangely similar group of movies.

• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) - One of the things I most admired about Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was that the films felt less like straight-up adaptation of the book and more like a synthesis of the material into a new form.  I liked some of the choices expressed in that synthesis more than others (and there were others still that I just plain disliked) but I appreciated the sense that Jackson was creating his own entity, one that was clearly connected to the book, but could still stand on its own.  The example I like to give is a scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which Boromir speaks longingly to Aragorn about the beauty of Minas Tirith, his fears for it and his desire to return to it.  It's a crucial scene in the film's process of humanizing Boromir, making him a more sympathetic figure, despite its tragic flaws, than he is in the book, and it also plays up Aragorn's own ambivalence about taking his place as king by opposing it to Boromir's devotion.  What I didn't realize until I reread The Lord of the Rings, however, was that though that conversation isn't in it, Boromir's dialogue is, as a bit of description of the White City.  By putting that description in Boromir's mouth, Jackson not only brought a bit of Tolkien's language into the film, but used it to humanize and complicate both Boromir and Aragorn in a way that Tolkien never intended.  There's nothing as wittily subversive as this in An Unexpected Journey, an adaptation that, if I can't quite call it slavish--there is too much extraneous material here, and too much deliberate shifting of the novel's themes and tone, for that term to apply--seems to be trying to replicate the novel on a page-by-page basis.  The result, given that Tolkien's original takes the classic children's book form of a series of episodic, nearly self-contained adventures, is a movie that feels shapeless and meandering, and whose tone shifts seemingly every half hour, from comedy to melodrama to farce to horror to action, and back all over again.
  
  And yet for all that, I found myself enjoying An Unexpected Journey very much.  I suspect that for viewers who haven't read the original book, the film will be a slog, because it lurches from one set piece to another with not only no end in sight, but no overarching structure that might give a sense of where its stopping point might come.  If you know the book, though, and are able to recognize that now we're doing chapter 5, it's a lot easier to sit back and let the film wash over you, and having done that I found it utterly charming, and for the most part successful in capturing the tone of the book and knitting its world believably to the darker one of the Lord of the Rings films.  So scenes like the dwarves' arrival at Bag End, or their capture at the hands of three dim-witted trolls with culinary pretensions, are as funny as they are in the book, while Bilbo's encounter with Gollum is suitably creepy and horrifying, and the various action set-pieces or eye candy are thrilling and breathtaking.  Tying it all together is Martin Freeman, who, for all of An Unexpected Journey's flaws and self-indulgence, justifies this project all on his own, the role of Bilbo being perfectly suited to his combination of bumbling fussiness and iron-hard core (for all my complaints about Sherlock, it can't be denied that that show gave Freeman the perfect platform from which to demonstrate how well he can embody this combination, so much so that An Unexpected Journey may very well owe a debt to Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss).  Even in its most shapeless and seemingly pointless moments, the film is at its strongest when it focuses on Freeman's Bilbo and his mingled joy and horror at what he discovers when he steps off his doorstep, and his slow growth towards the eccentric, high-spirited adventurer of the Lord of the Rings films is, as it was in the book, the film's heart.
  
  Less successful are those scenes in which Jackson and Co. try to tie The Hobbit together with The Lord of the Rings, both tonally and plot-wise.  These range from the harmless--a scene in which Gandalf and Galadriel worry that the enemy is growing stronger, which features a surprise guest appearance that I am stunned the production managed to keep secret--to the tedious--Elijah Wood was apparently flown to New Zealand and put in full Hobbit makeup solely so that he could unnecessarily tie together Bilbo's reminiscences and the opening scenes of The Fellowship of the Ring--to the silly--Sylvester McCoy as Radagast the Brown, who races around on a sled pulled by giant rabbits and gives CPR to animatronic hedgehogs, might have worked in a more lighthearted film, but given that it's Radagast's job to sound the first alarms about Sauron's return the contrast between his character and the story he's placed in is jarring--to the utterly tone deaf.  In the last category you'll find the entire sub-plot about Thorin's interim antagonist, Azog the Orc (if this is ringing no bells for fans of the books, that's because it's almost entirely an invention) and the parachuted-in theme of the dwarves' longing for home following their dispossession by Smaug.  As I predicted when I reread The Hobbit a few years ago, these are both attempts to get around how unromantic the dwarf characters are, the fact that their motivation is not honor or homesickness, but a simple desire for wealth.  But the film's attempts to recast the dwarves, and particularly Thorin, as heroic figures is brought short by the sheer mass of trite cliches it employs--Thorin is being pursued by the one-handed Orc who killed his grandfather; Bilbo feels unappreciated by Thorin, who derides him for his softness and lack of martial abilities; Thorin is tortured and angsty, often striking heroic, manly poses against the skyline while the other dwarf characters exposit his manpain.  Richard Armitage gives it his best shot, but the scenes that focus on him hew so closely to most hoary and oft-derided tropes of the epic fantasy genre that they often slide into unintentional comedy (the rest of the dwarves, who are allowed to be intentionally comedic, fare better, and the film even goes some way towards giving them their own quirks and personalities).  It's at these points that An Unexpected Journey's slow pace and meandering structure feel most onerous, and I'm a little concerned that as the story approaches the confrontation with Smaug and the Battle of the Five Armies, the films will sink even further into this po-faced, cod-Lord of the Rings mode.  For now, however, I'm content to be satisfied.  If An Unexpected Journey lacks The Fellowship of the Ring's coherence and epic sweep, it feels sufficiently of a piece with it, and, equally, sufficiently its own, more lighthearted creation, to be worth watching, and maybe even feeling cautiously optimistic about this new trilogy.
  
  
• Life of Pi (2012) - Personally, I've always found Life of Pi, the Booker-winning novel, to be wildly overrated.  It's a fun adventure, but to my mind it belongs on the same shelf as The Hobbit, as a YA-friendly story that adults can also enjoy, not the weighty philosophical treatise that its critical reception would seem to suggest.  Ang Lee's film of the novel is visually stunning, both in the early scenes depicting young Pi's life in India, growing up in his father's zoo and embracing three different religious creeds, and in its long central segment, in which Pi is shipwrecked and left adrift on a lifeboat with only a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker for company.  Lee's images are both surreal--as when a young Pi reads a comic book about the Hindu pantheon, and a panel about Shiva containing the universe in his throat opens up and swallows the viewer--and hyper-real, especially when he focuses on the wild creatures that define Pi's early life and his struggle for survival on the lifeboat.  In both cases, his visuals are masterful (and, as many reviewers have noted, make expert use of 3D--Life of Pi is one of the few films I've seen where the 3D feels essential to the film and its enjoyment), and even go some way towards justifying the novel's more egregious set pieces--I've never, for example, been able to work out the point of the interlude on the carnivorous island, but Lee realizes it so well (particularly the bemusing behavior of the massive herds of meerkats that populate the island) that in this version of the story it didn't rankle as much.  In its best moments, Life of Pi uses visuals to create the sense that Pi is in another world that is nevertheless part of ours--that he is seeing manifestations of nature, the ocean, and its creatures that hardly any human ever sees.  The tradeoff for all this beauty, however, is that the movie never feels very urgent.  In the novel, despite the framing story that reveals that Pi survives his ordeal even before we know what that ordeal was, there's a sense of tension stemming from his seemingly impossible situation, trapped on a lifeboat with a creature that will soon see him as a meal.  The methods Pi devises to not only survive but ensure Richard Parker's survival are clever and engaging, but the film treats them almost perfunctorily, clearly more invested in its visuals than in the business of Pi's survival.  When he experiences setbacks, such as when a wave washes away all his supplies and fresh water, there's no real sense of danger, and when he accomplishes some task necessary to his survival, there's no sense of accomplishment.
  
  This slackness is forgivable in the film's middle segment, however, since the visuals make up for any lack of urgency on the storytelling side. Less successful is Lee's handling of the novel's famous twist ending, in which Pi is challenged by representatives of the company investigating his shipwreck to give them a believable story, and after a moment replaces the tale of survival alongside a tiger with a gruesome, depressing story of cannibalism, murder, and man's inhumanity to man, asking them to choose the story they prefer.  I've always found that ending--and particularly its insistence that it represents a meaningful statement about religious faith--glib and supercilious, but what I did appreciate about it was that Martel played fair with his readers.  He never insisted that everything we'd been reading about for hundreds of pages had been a fantasy, and that the more horrible story had to be the truth, which made it possible for people like me, who didn't care for the facile moral that belief in God is nothing more or less than choosing the more appealing story, to continue to enjoy the novel for the tension it creates between two equally unlikely, equally fantastic survival stories.  Lee's Life of Pi, perhaps as a way of giving Suraj Sharma, who plays the teenage, castaway Pi, something to do after several hours of rather blank green screen acting (and, it must be said, very trite dialogue as he "converses" with Richard Parker), replaces the somewhat matter of fact, unadorned manner in which the alternate story is delivered to the insurance investigators with a long, detailed and emotional monologue that leaves no doubt that Pi is telling the truth--no one, much less a boy who has been deprived of human contact for months, could invent, from whole cloth and a moment's notice, such a gruesomely detailed story, and deliver it with so much emotion, grief and guilt (or, to put it another way, to believe that Pi, having lost his family so horribly, could invent an even more horrible way to have lost them, is to make the character almost monstrous).  Sharma nails the scene, in which Lee steps away from his visuals and simply remains fixed on his lead's face, but that accomplishment also means that the film leaves all its thematic eggs in the "choose which story you prefer" basket, which as I've said I find unsatisfying.  I suppose I can't complain that Lee has remained true to the spirit of the novel, even if I didn't care for that spirit, but I would have liked it if he'd left me the same escape hatch Martel had.
  
  
• Cloud Atlas (2012) - By the time I got around to watching the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer's gonzo, impossibly ambitious adaptation of David Mitchell's novel, the negative verdict on it had already been so decisively rendered that my expectations were buried somewhere beneath the Earth's mantle.  This turns out to be a good way to approach Cloud Atlas, which, while undeniably an unsuccessful mess of a movie that fails even to come close to doing justice to Mitchell's stunning novel, is nevertheless watchable and, for a film that is nearly three hours long and switches almost frenetically between six different plotlines, time periods, and genres, surprisingly fleet-footed (in that sense it is strangely similar to The Hobbit).  Some of that feeling of lightness no doubt stems from the fact that the film dispenses with Mitchell's nested structure, in which each of his six narratives begins, is interrupted--sometimes mid-sentence--by the next narrative, which is interrupted in its turn, and then all six narratives resume, in opposite order of their beginning, in the book's second half.  Instead, Cloud Atlas switches between its six plot strands with what feels almost like randomness, but if that description conjures up images of Magnolia-style mosaic movies transitioning leisurely from one narrative strand to another, it fails to do justice to Cloud Atlas's mayfly-level attention span.  It's only rarely that the film will remain with one of its plotline for more than a single scene, and sometimes it switches from one to the other for only a few lines of dialogue--at times, even interrupting an intense chase or action scene in order to check in on the more sedate goings-on in another story.
  
  What this means is that Cloud Atlas is a movie that is hard to get bored in, since if one of the stories, or even some part of it, doesn't interest you, it can be counted on to switch to another before long, and piecing the various strands' together requires enough effort to keep the viewer engaged (to the extent that I found myself wondering whether viewers who hadn't read the book wouldn't find themselves a little lost).  But the constant switching between storylines also has the effect of leaving some of them feeling underpowered, and of compounding what is otherwise an already quite powerful sense that the filmmakers themselves find some of their stories significantly less interesting than others.  It's not entirely surprising that these are the plot strands that don't lend themselves easily to high-octane, action storytelling--the Pacific journey of the young lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) in 1849, as he befriends an escaped slave and is slowly poisoned by the ship's doctor, the self-satisfied ramblings of Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) in 1938, who attempts to stave off financial and social ruin by becoming the amanuensis of an aging composer, and the misadventures of Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent), a publisher who in 2012 escapes his creditors only to be entrapped into checking himself into an old age home from which there is no escape.  Cloud Atlas is a great deal more interested in the stories of crusading investigative journalist Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), who lands in hot water when she discovers irregularities at a soon-to-be-opened nuclear plant in 1970s San Francisco, of "fabricant" Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), a genetically engineered fast food server in 22nd century Seoul who learns to think independently and becomes a figurehead for the anti-corporate revolution, and of post-industrial tribesman Zachry (Tom Hanks) who, hundreds of years in the future, helps Meronym, one of the few humans who still remembers history and technology (Berry again), to reach a communications outpost from which she hopes to signal Earth's long-lost colonies.
  
  Even here, however, the Wachowskis and Tykwer none-too-subtly skew Mitchell's original stories more strongly towards the adventurous and the action-filled.  The Sonmi story is particularly prone to this, as if the directors saw the production designers' sketches of a squalid, neon-lit urban jungle and couldn't help but reach for a sub-Blade Runner type of story, but in the Zachry plot as well there is a tendency to lose sight of the story's center--which is Zachry's struggle with his evil urges, whom he anthropomorphizes as a devil figure he calls Old Georgie (Hugo Weaving)--and instead to glorify martial ability, so that when Zachry fails to heed a warning from Sonmi (whom he reverse as a goddess) not to kill a helpless enemy, that moment, which in the novel is a failing that haunts him for the rest of his life, is quickly forgotten as he and Meronym join forces to fight off other marauders.  Even in the moments--such as most of the Luisa Rey strand--in which Cloud Atlas hews to the events of the novel and resists the urge to embroider or intensify them, it loses sight of Mitchell's playfulness, his quite deliberately tongue-in-cheek use of genre.  Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is a heartfelt novel, but not an earnest one.  The different tropes of genre that it employs in each of its narratives--and which it calls attention to by having each of its protagonists consume the previous narrative as a piece of fiction, a device that the movie employs only haphazardly and with little emphasis--have a distancing, skeptical affect that Cloud Atlas the movie lacks, and which in turn makes its message--about the universality of both suffering and kindness--come off as trite instead of meaningful.  Similarly, the choice to hammer in and literalize Mitchell's theme of reincarnation and repetition by having the same actors recur, sometimes crossing race and gender lines, in different plot strands runs the gamut from distracting--watching the film sometimes feels like a scavenger hunt, an attempt to spot a familiar actor under tons of makeup--to deeply problematic, in the scenes in the Sonmi segment in which Sturgess, Hanks, and Weaving are made up to look (unconvincingly) Asian.
  
  There are things to watch for in Cloud Atlas, but they are more in the way of moments.  Whishaw shows yet again that he is incapable of delivering a performance that is less than entirely magnetic, managing to make the self-absorbed, self-destructive Frobisher almost compelling despite the film's relative lack of interest in his plotline, and Bae ably conveys Sonmi's transition from naivete to steely resolve, and feels in many ways like the heart of the film.  Broadbent, meanwhile, manages to imbue a character that even in the novel felt the least thought out with humanity, and in his turns in the other plot strands--as a sadistic sea captain, or as Frobisher's employer and eventual nemesis--he is equally compelling and believable.  But for almost every good point in the movie, there is an equally bad one--Hanks is too old to play Zachry, who in the book is an inexperienced young man, even if you accept the film's reconfiguration of his relationship with Meronym as a romance, and though Berry is perfect for Luisa Rey, she's got too little to do as Meronym to be anything more than a font of information with which to torment and confuse Zachry, while other actors, like Weaving or Hugh Grant, are lost beneath bad makeup and even worse accents.  It's hard not to admire the film's scope, and as I've said it is by no means onerous despite its length and multiple storylines, but what it amounts to is a messy, admirable, often very ill-considered failure.
  
  
• Anna Karenina (2012) - The only one of these films whose original novel I haven't read (I know, I know), Anna Karenina is also the first of Joe Wright's lavish, hyper-melodramatic adaptations starring Keira Knightley that I've come to without having read and loved the original work.  Which might be an advantage as far as this film and I are concerned, since I found Wright's Pride and Prejudice and Atonement hopelessly overwrought, and hobbled by a tendency to file away anything spiky or unsentimental about their original works and turn them into a sweeping tearjerker.  For all I know, Wright has played the same trick on Anna Karenina--I somehow doubt Tolstoy's novel would be such an enduring classic if it were merely the tragic romance that Wright makes of it--but even taken as a tragic romance, his version of the story outstays its welcome.  The story of the eponymous heroine's irrational, obsessive love for the dashing but weak-willed cavalry officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who I kept expecting to turn into Tom Hiddleston, perhaps because I've been reading about Hiddleston's turn as a very similar character in the well-received The Deep Blue Sea just recently, and perhaps because Taylor-Johnson's efforts at conveying just the right mix of passion and selfishness falls short of what I know Hiddleston is capable of), to which she loses everything--her family, her place in society, and finally her life--loses steam about halfway into the movie, and by the end of it I felt most interested in, and sympathetic towards, Anna's husband (though I have to say it rather depresses me that we've already reached the point where Jude Law is playing the stolid, unromantic, less attractive corner of the love triangle).  Where Anna's descent into drug-addled neurosis feels inaccessible--it's impossible to sympathize with her all-consuming infatuation with such a callow crumpet as Vronsky--Karenin goes from cold, ineffectual correctness, to injured seething, to transcendent forgiveness, and finally to incomprehension at his wife's determination to destroy herself, and comes away from the film seeming--almost impossibly given that he represents the very patriarchy that has sold Anna like chattel and now expects her to abide by its rules--like its most decent character (in the Anna plotline, anyway; a secondary plot involves Anna's sister-in-law and the man who is in love with her, both of whom are quite positive figures, but which though well done feels, in Wright's version of the story, disconnected from the main plot).  By the film's last quarter, Anna becomes the epitome of a tragic heroine, so reduced as a character that even if I hadn't known about her fast-approaching date with a train, I feel certain I would have expected it, since there's nothing left for her to do but die.
  
  What does work about Anna Karenina is Wright's choice for the film's visuals.  He shoots the film in an old theater, with major scenes taking place framed by the proscenium arch and the footlights, and characters moving from one scene to another by cutting through the backstage and catwalks.  And if Wright's Anna Karenina is a play, it often feels like a musical, with musicians appearing to set the mood (in addition to the omnipresent musical score, which as is typical in Wright films is lush to the point of being overpowering) and characters all-but dancing into and out of their roles--the clerks at Anna's brother Oblonsky's (Matthew Macfayden) place of work, or the servants dressing Anna and other women--like cogs in a well-oiled machine.  Wright's point is no doubt to stress the artificiality of the society in which Anna, Karenin, and Vronsky move, and the theatricality of the film is never so obvious as in those scenes in which the characters attend balls and dance with one another, stressing the carefully laid out steps that proscribe their lives.  But to me the film's overt theatricality also does more than a little to counteract the staleness that tends to afflict period novel adaptations.  It feels like a wink to the audience, an acknowledgment that all this--the costumes, the mannerisms, the social mores--is an affectation not only of its own time period, but one that has been put on to entertain us, the 21st century audience eager for stories about forbidden love and tragic heroines.  Much like Anna's character, however, the theater device loses steam about halfway into the film--after a scene in which Wright manages, quite impressively, to simulate a horse-race on his stage, the film stops stressing the theater set.  Perhaps the idea was to allow that device to recede in order to leave space for the story's grand, tragic ending, but if so this represents Wright putting too much faith in his script and actors' ability to make us care about a rather melodramatic story.  I do plan to read Anna Karenina at some point, and I expect to find it a great deal more subtle and interesting than what Wright has made of it.  I only wish he had had the courage to stick with, and even intensify, his visual device all the way to the film's end--if he wasn't able to make a genuinely worthy adaptation, at least he could have made a truly interesting comment on the kinds of adaptations he's made a career out of.  As it stands, he's done neither.

File Under 'Hmm'

Via Edward Champion, we learn that Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) is trying to adapt David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for the screen, with the help of the Wachowski brothers.  Note that this article erroneously (I hope) assumes that Tykwer's adaptation will focus on only one of the novel's six narratives, and also that there's no indication of an actual production deal in place.

Champion calls Cloud Atlas 'an unfilmable novel', but I'm not sure I see how it is any more so than any other big, sprawling piece of fiction.  The nested narrative structure is unusual, but there have been plenty of films--including Run Lola Run--whose narratives were far less linear.  Unlike, say, Possession, Cloud Atlas makes the switch from story to story, period to period at only a few clearly marked locations--in that sense, the shape of the movie is predetermined, and 'all' that's left for a screenwriter is to fill in the details of each narrative.  Which of course is the problem, but it means that Cloud Atlas is no more unfilmable than Pride and Prejudice, and for much the same reasons: because there's too much going on in the novel to cram into at most three hours.  That sort of problem has been solved well on occasion, and badly much more often.  I guess we'll have to wait and see.