TORONTO -- Not quite soaring into the heavens, but not exactly crash-landing either, Cloud Atlas is an impressively mounted, emotionally stilted adaptation of British author David Mitchells bestselling eponymous novel. Written and directed by the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer, this hugely ambitious, genre-jumping, century-hopping epic is parts Babel and Tree of Life, parts Blade Runner, Amistad and Amadeus, with added doses of gore, CGI, New Age kitsch, and more prosthetics than a veterans hospital in wartime. One of the priciest independent films ever made (on a purported budget of $100 million), Atlas will rely on its chameleon cast to scale a 3-hour running time and reach the box office heights needed for this massive international co-production.
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Mitchels 500-plus page book garnered several literary prizes and a huge following after it was first published in 2004, but many would have said that the novels unique structurewhere multiple stories in different time periods are told chronologically from past to future and then back againwas impossible to adapt to the big screen.
The Wachowskis (with Lana receiving her first screen credit here) and Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The International) figured out they could streamline the narrative by cross-cutting between the different epochs and casting the same actors in a multitude of roles. Although this helps to make the whole pill easier to swallow, it also makes it harder to invest in each narrative, while seeing the actors transformed from old to young, black to white, and occasionally gender-bended from male to female, tends to dilute the overall dramatic tension.
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A brief prologue features an old man, Zachry (Tom Hanks), telling a story around a campfire, and from hereon in the film reveals how each plotline is in fact a tale toldor read or seen in a movieby the next one (this is also a process used in the book).
They are, in ascending order: an 1849 Pacific sea voyage where a crooked doctor (Hanks), a novice sailor (Jim Sturgess) and an escaped slave (David Gyasi) cross paths; a saga of dualing composers (Jim Broadbent, Ben Wishaw) set in 1936 Cambridge; a San Francisco-set 70s thriller about a rogue journalist (Halle Berry) taking on a nuclear power chief (Hugh Grant); a 2012-set comedy about a down-on-his-luck London book editor (Broadbent); a sci-fi love story about an indentured wage slave (Doona Bae) and the rebel (Sturgess) who rescues her, set in Neo Seoul in 2144; and a 24th century-set tale of tribal warfare, where Zachry teams up with a visiting explorer (Berre) in search of a groundbreaking, planet-shaking discovery.
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Despite their myriad differences, the half-dozen plot strands are coherently tied together via sharp editing by Alexander Berner (Resident Evil), who focuses on each separate story early on, and then mixes them up in several crescendo-building montages where movement and imagery are matched together across time. As if such links werent explicit enough, the characters all share a common birthmark, and have a tendency to repeat the same feel-good proverbs (ex. By each crime, and every kindness, we build our future) at various intervals.
Yet while the directorial trio does their best to ensure that things flow together smoothly enough and that their underlying messagebasically, no matter what the epoch, we are all of the same soul and must fight for freedomis heard extremely loud and incredibly clear, there are so many characters and plots tossed about that no one storyline feels altogether satisfying. As history repeats itself and the same master vs. slave scenario keeps reappearing, everything gets homogenized into a blandish whole, the impact of each story softened by the constant need to connect the dots.
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Of all the pieces of the puzzle, the ones that feel the most effective are the 70s investigative drama, which has shades of Alan Pakula and Finchers Zodiac, and the futuristic thriller, where the Wachowskis show they can still come up with some nifty set-pieces, even if the production design (by Uli Hanisch and Hugh Bateup) and costumes (by Kym Barrett and Pierre-Yves Gayraud) feel closer to the artsy stylings of Wong Kar Wais 2046 than to the leather Lollapalooza that is The Matrix trilogy.
Perhaps such choices go hand in hand with a movie that yearns to be both arthouse and blockbuster, yet cant seem to make up its mind. Thus, the decision to utilize the same actors helps to visually link up the plots, but is so conspicuous that it distracts from the drama. Its hard to take Berry seriously when shes been anatomically morphed into a Victorian housewife (shes much better as the crusading reporter), or to swallow Hanks as a futuristic Polynesian tribesmen with a face tattoo and a funny way of talking (he says things like Tell me the true true.)
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Broadbents experience in spectacles like Moulin Rouge! and Topsy-Turvy makes him better equipped for such shape-shifting, and his present day scenario is both the silliest and in some ways, the most touching. But its Hugo Weaving who seems to have more fun than anyone, especially when he plays a nasty retirement home supervisor reminiscent of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and does so by getting into full-out drag. Its an effect thats amusingly disarmingnot to mention evocative of Lana Wachowskis recent backstoryin a film that aims for the clouds but is often weighed down by its own lofty intentions.
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Production companies: Cloud Atlas X-Filme, Creative Pool, Anarchos, in association with A Company and Ard Degeto
Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Wishaw, Keith David, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon
Directors: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski
Screenwriters: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
Producers: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Grant Hill, Stefan Arndt
Executive producers: Philip Lee, Uwe Schott, Wilson Qiu
Directors of photography: John Toll, Frank Griebe
Production designers: Uli Hanisch, Hugh Bateup
Costume designers: Kym Barrett, Pierre-Yves Gayraud
Music: Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer
Editor: Alexander Berner
Visual effects supervisor: Dan Glass
Sales: Warner Bros. Pictures (U.S.), Focus Features International (Outside U.S.)
R rating, 171 minutes
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