I should say impressions.*
I wish the filmmakers had trusted the audience more, trusted their story would do the work. The resonances they tried so hard to establish through narration would be there: in the repeated lines of dialogue, in the recycling of actors. The matching and crosshatching of storylines is rendered clearly enough (maybe? It's hard to tell, having read the book) without these devices.
*
The risks of difficulty, of trying to build a bridge for your reader, when perhaps they have figured their way across without you.
*
I am trying to understand if the film would mean as much to me without having read the novel, without having read the novel first and seen the film second. I can't unread the book; it is there, lodged deep in my imagination. It's worked on me for years, something my brain turns over and over again, always keeping an eye on it. At a reading in Boston a few years ago, David Mitchell discussed his own desires as a reader and how they informed the structure of Cloud Atlas. I'm pretty sure he said it was Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler that cinched things. That he was so taken with Calvino's playful form, but the book also left him feeling bereft as a reader, to have to leave the characters mid-scene and never come back to them. So he came back to them.
*
Still struck by Mitchell's absolute commitment to deal with the effects of colonialism and global capitalism. At the risk of sounding like a vulgar liberal humanist, he makes my heart feel bigger and more determined about what art can do.
*
Of course Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent win this contest. But then it never was one, for me.
*
Also, where can I get Jim Broadbent's coat? Seriously, it's amazing.
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