There is at least one masterpiece in the bulky, multistoried, socio-political-philosophical edifice known as Cloud Atlas.
It’s a narrative set in “neo-Seoul” in the year 2044. In a visionary futurescape somewhere between Blade Runner and The Fifth Element, the world is divided between humans and synthetic, cloned “fabricants,” though the relationship is just another variation on master and servant. Sonmi 451 (Doona Bae) is one such fabricant, where she and her fellow androids serve misogynistic customers at a candy-colored fast-food restaurant built atop of a see-through koi pond. It’s like today’s virtual-reality playgrounds, made real in 30 years’ time.
In a pitch-black satire of capitalism’s natural progression, these indentured servants are created to serve consumers, who are worshipped as the new gods, living in megalopolises while the identical servers sleep in numbered units in a wall. The customer is not only always right; if a fabricant responds to one of his insults, the business owner can press a button that remotely kills the fabricant on the spot. It’s a hellish life – the plantations of the pre-Civil War South taken to their technological extreme – so when the leader of a rebel army smuggles Sonmi into the “real world,” it becomes a revelation for her, in more ways than one.
This sounds like an entire movie on its own, and it probably should have been. But it’s only one-sixth of Cloud Atlas, an adaptation of David Mitchell’s award-winning 2004 book. The ambitious weight of this thing could sink a cruise ship: There are three directors (Tom Tykwer, of Run Lola Run, and Lana and Andy Wachowski, of Matrix fame), five A-list stars, seven filming locations in three European countries, and 164 minutes of cross-cutting action. With a budget of $100 million, it’s the most expensive independent release ever made.
And I’m not the first to say that there’s no way this flick will recoup expenses, let alone sneak its way onto Oscar ballots, despite its admirable intentions. It’ll probably be remembered as another Heaven’s Gate or Southland Tales – an imaginative failure worshipped by a cult minority and dismissed by the mass of audiences that wish they hadn’t thrown away three hours. The actual result, as usual, is somewhere between these extremes.
We begin in the Pacific Islands in 1849. Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) is a shipwrecked notary from San Francisco who is seeking medical advice from a shifty doctor (Tom Hanks) for an apparent malady. The doctor accompanies him on board his ship, which significantly includes a stowaway slave. Next, we jump ahead to Cambridge in 1936, where Ben Whishaw plays a fatalistic musician who becomes an apprentice to a legendary composer as a way to jump-start his own visionary career. In San Francisco in 1973, Halle Berry is Luisa Rey, a muckraking magazine journalist who, to her own peril, comes across a tip that Big Oil might be trying to silence an important report about a nuclear power plant.
In present-day London, foppish publisher Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) becomes indebted to the mob, so he spirits himself away to a hotel on the recommendation of his spiteful brother; strange happenings ensue. There’s the aforementioned Sonmi-451 story, and finally the most perplexing narrative in the film, set many centuries in the future, where land has been de-industrialized and dissected into savage tribes.
Tom Hanks, who, like the other main actors, appears as a different character in every narrative, plays a devil-hallucinating goatherd who falls in love with a mysterious visitor (Berry again) from another land. The accents here are New Orleans-thick and riddled with as much fictional diction as A Clockwork Orange; subtitles would have been much appreciated.
By dividing its sections between directors with disparate styles and visions, the end result of Cloud Atlas is a cocktail that doesn’t mix, like aged whisky and Mountain Dew. The ’70s scenes play like a gritty urban crime thriller in the Friedkin or Frankenheimer mold; the 1849 sequence is a poor man’s Amistad; and the contemporary storyline plays like a fawlty British farce, landing with a laughless thunk.
The film goes from head-scratchingly intellectual to head-slappingly simplistic from one scene from the next, laying out beautifully dense connections between scenes and then proceeding to explain them all away in stilted philosophical aphorisms. There are scenes so moving you’ll want to cry, and others so dumb you’ll wonder if Mel Gibson had excreted them onto the cutting-room floor of Apocalypto.
The film’s overriding theme is that we’re all connected beyond our comprehension – that bodies are just momentary receptacles for souls that gravitate toward one another in future lifetimes (which explains such inexplicable sensations as déjà vu). Life is a vast honeycomb of transfigurated linkage.
It’s a fascinating concept, one bigger than perhaps any film can handle, and I credit these three mavericks for trying. Unfortunately, the novelty of seeing the same actors in six roles confuses this sentiment, because Tom Hanks in one lifetime doesn’t become Tom Hanks in another lifetime; the two “souls” are played by different men and women throughout the millennia, rendering the decision to brand these actors six different ways to Sunday a pointless one indeed.
That said, the directors’ editing rhythms and dialogue can be exhilarating at times, as seemingly aberrant images and lines from one narrative can resound with profundity in another, some 30 minutes later. In the filmmakers’ (and the author’s) pessimistic and far-reaching worldview, we are destined to repeat ourselves in circles of construction and destruction, of liberation and enslavement. Human nature leads inexorably toward genocide; yesterday’s concentration camps are tomorrow’s fabricant death camps, and today’s technological expansion is the future’s agrarian reversal. Only timeless, spiritual love, freed from the shackles of human folly, will prevail.
As much – and as often – as Cloud Atlas strays off the reservation, this remains some heavy (and heady) stuff for an autumn blockbuster.
CLOUD ATLAS. Directors: Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski; Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant; Distributor: Warner Brothers; Rating: R; Now playing