Hugs & Cloud Atlas

Hugging is therapeutic. I don’t mean the kind where two people bend at the waist and pat each other on the shoulder. I mean full body hugging. More therapeutic than a kiss, especially the kiss on the cheek or forehead. Most men don’t feel comfortable hugging another man, but I do. The hug is comforting, saying by the act how sorry we are at the bad news the other has just received. Or how much the hugger loves the huggee. The world would be a much better place if we all gave each other a hug occasionally, or better yet, a hug often. So, dear reader, please assume that I just gave you an internet hug. There, don’t you feel better?

I went to see Cloud Atlas yesterday and was very impressed . . . and very confused. Almost three hours of Cloud Atlas. And I left the theater after nearly three hours just as confused as I was at the beginning. I felt like I’d just seen six separate stories all glued together in bits and pieces. The film tells us that everyone is connected in time and space. The Korean clone Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), when her interrogator asks her if she is afraid of death, explains that death is just a door. When the door shuts, another door opens, and we move through time as though through the chambers in a nautilus, back and forth from one chamber to another, all connected. The six main characters and their stories overlap as their lives play out, with each of them assuming different roles in different times. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant, and Doona Bae all play up to six different but related characters spanning times from 1849 to 2346 and a postapocalyptic primitive society (Hanks as a nervous goatherder) and visitors from a distant planet (Berry as emissary). It’s sort of fun guessing which actor is playing which character. The critics are all over the map in their assessments of this movie, either hating it or loving it, very few taking the middle ground. New Yorker movie critic Richard Brody called it “synchronized banality.” Roger Ebert thought it was so good he saw it twice and was looking forward to seeing it a third time. He says, “But, oh, what a film this is! And what a demonstration of the magical, dreamlike qualities of the cinema. And what an opportunity for the actors. And what a leap by the directors, who free themselves from the chains of narrative continuity.” I guess I’ll go along with Roger and see it again, and maybe even again. Maybe I won’t be so confused after the third time.