Cloud Atlas Review: Yellowface And Orientalism

Hugo Weaving playing a Korean enforcer

James D’Arcy playing a Korean archivist

James D’Arcy as himself

I’m not sure whether to say that the film’s makeup and special-effects department did a “bad” job in the yellowface department.  I mean, given their task, this may have been the best they could do, although one would think that if you could turn Eddie Murphy into an old white Jewish man, you could do a better job with Hugo Weaving.  I didn’t really find the yellowface all that believable with these actors.  Perhaps because I had been seeing them throughout the film in their non-yellowface roles.  While I understand the impulse to want to use the same actors in all the segments of the film, there are things I wondered about, for example:

1) In the first segment, which takes place aboard a schooner in the mid-19th century, the Polynesian/aboriginal “slaves” are portrayed by African American and Afro-British actors.  It could be that the film decided to transplant African slaves into the South Pacific, but I wondered about why the filmmakers didn’t just hire aboriginal/South Pacific/Maori actors to play these roles?

2) While it’s true that the racial masquerade isn’t just inclined towards yellowface–that there are Asian and black actors who are in whiteface–Halle Berry plays a German Jewish woman, Bae Doona plays a 19th-century lawyer’s wife in SF and she plays a Latina sweatshop worker in 1970s SF–no one in the film is in blackface (which I am glad about).  My point is this: while it’s understandable according to the logic of the film to put both black and white actors in yellowface for the scenes taking place in Neo Seoul, why wasn’t that same logic applied for the scenes depicting Polynesian slaves–that not one white actor or Asian actor was put into blackface I think is a recognition on the filmmakers parts that to do so would have been to have ignited a (pardon my language) shitstorm.  But yellowface they figured they could get away with.