'Cloud Atlas': incredibly ambitious, ultimately imperfect, but admirable

An old man with a scared face and milky eye (Tom Hanks) spins a twisting yarn at a fireside, telling a tale of disconnected interconnectedness. His story has intrigue and action, romance, comedy, and everything in-between; politicized social commentary, overt themes of love and loss and death, life and rebirth. His mostly unseen audience, ostensibly a group of children listening to this wise old sage's contorted creation charting mankind’s journey through the ages, is intently enthralled as he speaks of this saga.

But those children matter little, and really the old man is addressing the moviegoer sitting in the theater. A moviegoer who undoubtedly marvels too, at the audacity of this story, which finds more than two-dozen characters—many played by the same actors, some so disguised by makeup and hidden behind impressive visual effects they become unrecognizable—interacting throughout several different eras. The echoes of these many people—perhaps their very souls—ripple across time, their actions and inaction affecting each somehow. Why? In what way? And for the benefit, or to the detriment, of who? Questions asked, and in ways answered, by the audience and even the characters they're watching.

If nothing else—although, indeed, it is certainly something else—‘Cloud Atlas’ is an ambitious film. It’s a sprawling, immense and occasionally unwieldily, 3-hour Epic, with a $100 million budget; all of which was funneled uncompromisingly onto the screen through independently financed means—mostly from German backers and not Warner Brothers (who are simply distributing the film theatrically in the US). It’s a blending of genres, from action-packed science fiction and fantasy to part slow-paced period drama, suspenseful enviro-political thriller and, in places, even comedy. Six (or is that seven?) storylines, each set in a different time and place, directed and written by three different filmmakers, featuring a troupe of well-known actors who often disappear into numerous roles through masterful makeup, CG trickery and total Method.

In the middle of the 19^th century, Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) is a lawyer dying aboard a ship sailing from New Zealand—where he’s just secured the purchase of several hundred Maori slaves—to his home and awaiting wife back in San Francisco. In what he presumes are his final days, under the care of Dr. Henry Goose (Hanks) and a self-freed slave (David Gyasi), Adam records his story to the pages of his journal.

A journal read, in 1936, by Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), a disgraced aristocrat disowned by his family for loving another man. Frobisher takes a job as an assistant to one of the greatest composers of his time, Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent), hoping that one day, under Ayrs tutelage, he’ll re-emerge to high society as the composer of a musical masterpiece himself.

Frobisher communicates his story in correspondences with the man whom he loved, Rufus Sixsmith (Hugh D’Arcy), who, in 1970s, has become a scientist working at a nuclear power plant owned by seedy industrialist Lloyd Hooks (Hugh Grant). When Sixsmith is murdered, investigative reporter Louisa Rey (Halle Berry) uncovers, with the help of insiders (Hanks, Keith David), the dark secret behind the plant—an impending environmental disaster—and comes into possession of Frobisher’s letters to his lost lover; letters she can’t stop reading.

In 2012, indebted publisher Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent) reflects on his recent (mis)adventure, which he plans to present in a new novel called 'The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish'.  Cavendish meets a minor masterstroke of luck when his new client suddenly becomes a Best-Selling author after throwing a particularly pretentious reviewer from a rooftop, instantly killing the critic and landing the writer behind bars. But when Cavendish finds himself in trouble with the thuggish author—more correctly, his brutish brothers not behind bars—he runs first to the safety of a lost love (Susan Sarandon) and then his wealthy family for help, only to get locked up in a nursing home against his will. Inside, he meets a few not-quite-insane old-timers wrongfully "imprisoned" too, and plots their escape. 

Cavendish's tale of triumph, made into a movie of much acclaim, proves important in the dystopian future of Neo-Seoul circa the 22^nd century, where a clone slave named Sonmi-451 (Donna Bae) is inspired by the old man's resilience and willingness to fight for what's right. Soon, she finds herself a symbol around which a band of resistance fighters—her eventual lover, Hae-Joo Chang (Sturgess), among them—can rally and attempt to restore some semblance of order and justice in a society gone corrupt.

In the post-apocalyptic future of that future, maniacal cannibals roam the scorched earth, and a tribesman named Zachry (Hanks) and one of the last remaining members of a technologically superior super-race (Berry) journey to a faraway outpost hoping to signal an off-world colony to rescue Earth’s dying children.

Confusing at times? Ultimately, and unfortunately, yes. And the length—needed for the sheer scope of this picture though it certainly is—does pose problems, largely with pacing. But that’s not to say this ambitious adaptation by screenwriters Andy and Lana Wachowski (who directed three segments as a unit) and Tom Tykwer (who directed the other three himself) of an equally grand novel by author David Mitchell makes for a bad movie. Not at all.

It’s a marvel, truly, that this tale has been told—let alone in a passably coherent way—on the big screen. Many considered Mitchell’s tome inadaptable to any other medium, impossible to transfer from page to stage… or movie-house, I guess. Yet, the Wachowski siblings—the minds behind the ‘Matrix’ movies, the screenplay of James McTiegue’s ‘V For Vendetta’ adaptation, and several other films of admittedly varying quality—and German director Tykwer, who gave us ‘Run Lola Run’ and ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ (both excellent, twisty, stories, and great movies to boot), have succeeded… for the most part.

‘Cloud Atlas’ is an imperfect film, but, flaws and all, an admirable attempt at trying something rarely seen in cinema. Surely, this will be a divisive motion picture—not everyone will warm to the disjointed narrative, themes that are sometimes too subtle and other times too bluntly blatant, and unusual nature of the casting and acting, which asks the viewer at various points to accept Halle Berry as a blonde Jewish woman, Jim Sturgess as Korean, and Hugo Weaving as one of the most unusual villains ever committed to celluloid in the hulking six-foot-tall Nurse Noakes. (Yes, fans of ‘The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’, that means Weaving’s in drag once again. This time he’s supposed to be an actual woman, though.)

The six stories in ‘Atlas’ were produced unusually, with the workload split between two almost entirely autonomous units. The Wachowski's guided Adam Ewing’s sea voyage and the two futuristic sections, with Tykwer helming the three middle entries. Each group had their own crew—separate cinematographers, production designers, costume people, etc. This gives a strange, disconnected, quality to the film you’re watching unfold—both aesthetically and thematically. The film jumps between the segments non-linearly, and the shifts between the work of the two units can be jarring when they happen.

Nearly every actor appears in each of the six (counting the future, of the future, of the future, in which Hanks sits by the fireside, that’s actually seven) timelines. Sometimes they're playing a large part, but occasionally left to a mere cameo (maybe only seen in pictures on a mantelpiece). The familiarly yet-distinctly-different faces of each provide grounded-ness, in part because the acting (and creation of character) is so strong.

However, there’s a definite strangeness to the disjointed tones and style in the meshing of segments, perfectly portrayed characters aside, with a clear line between the work of the siblings and the German. Tykwer’s three segments are the most consistent, and I think in places vastly better directed, more interesting, and more competently adapted. The film works best when cutting between his three entries. (And, although less perfectly, the same is true for the other three; each trio compliments itself).

The Wachoski-directed material is where most of the flaws present themselves. The shipboard scenes hold little interest, grow repetitive once Adam takes ill, and seem rather irrelevant to the overall plot of the other five stories, aside from the journal being the catalyst of the entire sequence of events rippling across time and space, until—nearly two and a half hours in—a connection of themes (oppression, slavery, and freedom-fighting) bluntly links the ship with the dystopian segment. The two futuristic "story fragments" have plenty of well-done action sequences—specifically the CGI-stuffed sections in neo-Seoul, which often looks like an even more visually ridiculous ‘Speed Racer’—but they lack the moody atmosphere, intrigue and general creepiness of the middle, not to mention feature a far less logical flow of narrative. The post-apocalypse, in which characters speak in a near-impenetrable future-dialect, is perhaps 'Atlas'' most problematic aspect of all, as these scenes are packed with dense exposition, yet much of what is being said can only be surmised through assumption based on presumed context. Also, a strange monster in a top-hat (Weaving)—who we assume is a demonic internalization of Zachry's struggle with the more blood-thirsty barbarism lurking somewhere deep within his character —is a very weird sight, and not something that always works.

Are some of these issues inherent to Mitchell's source novel? I have no idea—I started reading it yesterday—although a few probably are (then again, from what I know, the storytelling approaches between the film and the novel are quite different). What I am certain of is I found myself enjoying and far more invested in Tykwer's middle segments—the dark and atmospheric psychological study of blind ambition and betrayal in the 1930s, cold 'Silkwood'-ian thriller set in the 70s, and weirdly humorous contemporary segments with Broadbent's Cavendish mounting a Cuckoo’s Nest-esque escape from the countryside confines in which he's being held in captivity.

The editing between the segments—which flow like frenzied fragments, following sometimes little logic, rhyme or reason in spots—is inconsistent, too. In places, the edits are really well done; in others, they're not as tight as should be, jumping from future to the past and back again not as smooth as is needed for clarity. Again, this is not to say ‘Cloud Atlas’ is bad. Far from it, and I liked the film a lot. It’s just not a masterpiece, as much as it seems like one sometimes (or how badly I wanted it to be).

The acting is uniformly excellent. Which is, I suppose, expected given the caliber of, and names in, the cast. Weaving, of couse, is wonderful. He plays the villain in each timeline with chilling craftsmanship—from his peripheral presence in the 19^th century, to his monocle-wearing maybe-Nazi in the 1930s, haunting hitman in the employ of the industrialist in the 70s, off-putting gender-bending frame in 2012, sly government agent in neo-Seoul, and goddamn creepy goblin-ghost thing in the post apocalypse, he’s a scary menace. Ben Whishaw—making his debut as Q in the new James Bond movie ‘Skyfall’ soon, too—and old, awesome, standard Jim Broadbent turn in excellent, brilliantly emotive, performances, giving their primary story-lines added dramatic heft.

But it's the actors completely unrecognizable from their usual selves who occupy some of the best parts.  Sturgess is amazing, having two of the most significant roles in the story and making each character so strikingly different you wouldn't know one man was also the other even if someone told you. Hanks and Berry show some surprising range—(fleeting favorite: Halle Berry as an aged Asian doctor with a mechanical microscope-eye, say what?)—with Hanks, the nicest guy in the business and one of the coolest people on the planet, apparently, making a very memorable showing as a truly evil baddie in one era.

From the epic, labyrinthine and at times tangential plotting, to the gargantuan cast of characters (if not, considering the actual size, a particularly large group of players, due to the way many actors fill multiple parts), ‘Cloud Atlas’ is quite like a novel come to life on screen. Which, for the most part, is exactly what it is. But it’s also a film—shot beautifully in vast 2.35:1 widescreen, overstuffed with elaborate period detailing and design—and, with a sweeping score by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil and lush cinematography by John Toll and Frank Griebe, a truly purposeful piece of cinematic art.

Admittedly, ‘Atlas’ doesn’t always mesh, and isn’t free of flaw. But it’s a genuinely good film. One that is a rare beast in the cinema of today: a movie that is more than just a movie. It’s an experience. It is a fully realized creation, set in a world that pulls the viewer in with its epic scale, keeps them interested in what happens to that world with the many masterfully portrayed characters, and leaves you pondering the possibilities of the many, many questions it asks. ‘Cloud Atlas’ is quite unlike anything in theaters today, which is why it should be applauded, admired and seen.

'Cloud Atlas'
Directed and written by: Tom Tykwer & Andy and Lana Wachowski
Based on a novel by: David Mitchell
Starring: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Donna Bae, Ben Whishaw, James D'Arcy, Zhou Xun, Keith David, David Gyasi with Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant
Music by: Tom Tykwer & Johnny Klimek & Reinhold Heil
Rating: R
Runtime: 172 minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.