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 It’s
possible, if daunting, to imagine a brilliant movie that could be conjured out
of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas—a film that would play with the
language of cinema the way Mitchell’s nimble, tricksy book plays with the
English language.* It would have to be an adaptation that opened up like an
accordion to contain six separate mini-movies: a Master and Commander-style
shipboard adventure, a love story set in pre-WWII England, a ’70s paranoid
thriller, a farcical jailbreak picture, and not one but two sci-fi films set in
separate dystrophic futures. And such a film would have to leap among all these
separate storylines, each with its own distinct voice and style, while
elaborating like a symphony on the work’s larger theme—which, without spoiling,
I can say has to do with the eternal recurrence of souls through time, and the
lasting karmic echo of both good and evil deeds.
Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of Cloud Atlas is
emphatically not that movie. Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film
is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between
long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there’s something commendable
about the directors’ commitment to their grandiose act of folly. This movie is,
for the most part, is a mixed bag, but a part of me enjoyed it—I never, for
example, begrudged it its running time, which at 2 hours and 50 minutes is
saying something.
Much of the fun to be had in watching Cloud Atlas lies in puzzling out what the
filmmakers were even trying to do: I’m not sure they themselves knew (or agreed)
entirely. The Wachowskis have summed the movie up as the story of how Tom Hanks
evolves over centuries from a bad person to a good person, but that description
doesn’t really jibe with what we see onscreen (nor does Tykwer’s assertion that
the actors are “playing souls, not characters”). Rather, Hanks (along with Halle
Berry, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, and other actors) appears as a series of
individuals throughout history, each of whose acts will have an impact, positive
or negative, on generations of lives to come. It’s not the case, quite, that
each successive Berry or Hanks is the reincarnation of the previous one; rather,
they play different people over a five-century span whose lives crisscross and
mirror one another in such a way as to suggest some sort of trans-historical
cosmic order.
Thus, in the opening frame story, we see Hanks as a disfigured old man, musing
by the fire in what appears to be a futuristic Stone Age. Next, he’s a dubiously
ethical doctor aboard a ship bound across the Pacific to San Francisco in 1849.
In 1973, he’ll pop up as a tormented (and turtlenecked) engineer at a nuclear
plant, debating whether to leak an incriminating inspection document to a prying
tabloid reporter (Berry). In 2012, Hanks has a brief (and highly unconvincing)
turn as a cockney gangster-turned-memoirist who takes shocking revenge on a
snooty book critic. And in some year so far into the apocalyptic future it’s
dated only as “106 years after the Fall,” Hanks plays a pelt-clad,
crude-tool-wielding family man who must team up with a high-tech visitor (Berry)
to save his wife and daughter from a tribe of marauding cannibals led by Hugh
Grant.
In between, there are storylines that focus on other actors as well. In the
early 1930s, a young British composer (Ben Whishaw) becomes the scribe for a
much older and more famous composer (Jim Broadbent), and the two men fall into a
difficult relationship that’s half love affair, half murderous rivalry. And in
the 22nd century, a cloned fast-food worker raised in sterile isolation (Doona
Bae) begins to develop first a consciousness and then a conscience, eventually
taking up arms in a rebellion against the totalitarian state. This clone-wars
story is the most visually inventive of the six plotlines, even if it does
borrow some of its boldest images from pre-existing sci-fi dystopias, from the
Wachowskis' own The Matrix to that ever-reliable template for bleak-yet-rad
futurescapes, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
The only storyline in Cloud Atlas that gave me sustained pleasure—and laughs
that weren’t at the movie’s expense—was the plot (directed by Tywker) involving
Jim Broadbent as a shabby-genteel London publisher who must go into hiding when
pursued by a client’s thuggish family, and eventually finds himself being held
prisoner in an old-folks’ home by a sadistic Hugo Weaving in hideous
latex-assisted drag. Broadbent has a wildly expressive face and a gift for
broad, self-mocking comedy: his double-takes and bewildered expressions are like
something out of a Wallace and Gromit short, and the scenes in which he and a
group of fellow residents mount a plan to bust out of the nursing home is the
movie’s delightfully unserious high point. Broadbent is also exceptionally good
as the aged composer who takes in Ben Whishaw: an intimate scene between the two
at the piano was one of the rare moments in which this floridly excessive movie
actually touched me emotionally.
Too much of the rest of Cloud Atlas founders in sentimentality, gooey New Age
aphorisms, or gleefully vindictive bursts of gory violence (some scenes,
especially in the future-set stories, evince a queasy mixture of all three).
“The weak are meat, the strong do eat,” snarls Hanks early in the film as that
morally bankrupt shipboard doctor. You may feel you’ve lived as many lifetimes
as Hanks himself by the time his post-apocalyptic self reappears to put that
maxim to the test, but it’s not clear that either he or humanity at large have
made that much spiritual progress. Throughout the movie, the directors’ dark
vision of history as a ruthless march toward the slaughterhouse coexists
uneasily with their romanticization of individual acts of heroism. I can’t get
into the larger moral questions the movie raises without major plot spoilage,
but I’m not sure the Wachowskis’ and Tykwer’s almost Marxist vision of human
history as a succession of upwardly scaleable acts of compassion and vengeance
is, in the end, as uplifting as they mean it to be.
Part of the point of the book was a virtuosic display of different literary
styles, and the potential for a varied buffet of filmmaking styles is there in
the material. In not taking advantage of that, the filmmakers allow a certain
monotony of amplification to set in, in spite of the varying settings and
breathtaking special effects. It's kind of astonishing that for all its ambition
and accomplishment, and for the ostensibly subversive philosophy it pushes,
"Cloud Atlas" ends up being just another platitudinous, overblown,
pummel-you-into-submission movie-machine. It's a blue pill pretending to be a
red pill.
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