“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future” – Sonmi-351, Cloud Atlas.
In Cloud Atlas,
the infinitely ambitious, ingenious sprawling epic made by German director Tom
Tykwer (of Run Lola Run fame) and
Lana and Andy Wachowski (the creators of The
Matrix), characters’ lives that transpire at different places in space and
time are indelibly linked. A film about migratory souls and wayward
civilizations, the movie intertwines not only the different narrative threads
but the characters themselves; everything is connected. All human life is universalized
through a thirst for freedom and a hunger (“Hunger? For what?” asks one of Tom
Hanks’ many characters at some point) “for more.”
To begin to explain the plot(s) of Tykwer and the
Wachowskis’ film would add up to nothing more than an enumeration of names,
places, and times, and although the sheer scope of the film is worth
describing, the complexly woven narrative doesn’t make for neat unpacking. Spanning
a period of just under 500 years, this daring, daunting, dreamlike film is actually
made up of six different, interlaced stories.
Based on David Mitchell’s visionary novel of the same name, Cloud Atlas begins in 1849 on a voyage
in the Pacific Islands and ends some 200 years into our future, in a
post-apocalyptic, neo-tribal Hawaii, linking the characters through life,
death, triumph, defeat, art, fate, and above all, love.
In the 19th century, Jim Sturgess plays Adam
Ewing, a lawyer making his way home through the South Seas on a merchant vessel
and forming an unlikely friendship with escaped Maori slave Autua (David Gyasi).
In pre-World War II Britain, the young, talented Frobisher (Ben Wishaw) creates
his own masterful composition (“The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” from which the movie’s
title comes) while working as amanuensis to a cantankerous old musician. In 1970s’
San Francisco, Luisa Rey (Halle Berry) is an investigative reporter on her way
to uncovering a massive conspiracy. Closer to present times, British publisher
Timothy Cavendish (a delightful Jim Broadbent) is on the professional and
personal ropes until his vengeful brother sticks him in a Cuckoo’s Nest-like old people’s home. One of the film’s most urgently
moving sections takes place in 22nd century socially stratified New
Seoul, where genetically engineered fabricants serve master consumers until one
of them, Sonmi-351 (played by Korean model turned actress Doona Bae), wakes up
to the possibility of being human, and that of being free. Fast forward to “106
winters after the Fall,” and civilization is essentially divided into two ends
of the technological spectrum with nothing in between: tattooed tribal
cave-dwellers like Zachry (Tom Hanks), who speak a sort of futuristic pidgin at
times difficult to discern, and high-tech travelers who traverse the universe
in water ships that directly reference the boat in the first story.
At almost three hours running time, with the diversity and
density of the material covered, it’s not difficult to understand why the film
needed not one but three directors. While the Wachowsky siblings tackle the
most distant chapters in time (the 1849, Neo-Seoul and Hawaii sections), Tykwer
sticks closer to the present with the 1930s’ Edinburgh musician, San Francisco
journalist, and British publisher sections. Tykwer’s chapters are smaller,
tighter, funnier, and often more emotionally involving; the Wachawskis’ are
bigger, louder, grander, and more spectacle-driven.
In a film that comprises a sweeping epic, a period piece, a love
story, a suspenseful political thriller, a dystopian sci-fi fantasy with hints
of Orwellian satire, melodrama, comedy, action, mystery, and tragedy, sometimes
all at once, each director and story has its own unique style. Ewing’s voyage
has the look and feel of a historical drama; Frobisher’s segment benefits from
a quiet, tasteful, and poised theatricality; French Connection-era naturalism informs Luisa Rey’s chapter;
Cavendish’s ordeal receives the treatment of a cozy British comedy; Sonmi’s
tale evolves in a pop-culture, futuristic Matrix-esque
milieu; and sheep-herder Zachry inhabits a form of postmodern Primitivism.
The movie’s interwoven threads are at times simply and
elegantly braided, at other times a tangled and knotted narrative mass. The
shifts between the different strands are for the most part seamless, aided by
the brilliant editing of Alexander Berner, as Cloud Atlas ping-pongs between these different stories without ever
getting too confusing.
All the actors appear as multiple characters. Broadbent
takes on the role of Cavendish with great gusto and flair, and then tones it
down to play aging musician Vyvyan Ayrs and the South Pacific ship captain.
Halle Berry plays the reporter, but also the woman Zachry falls in love with,
as well as Ayrs’ wife, and a few other roles she is completely unrecognizable
in, including an old Asian man. Susan Sarandon appears in a few short roles,
tracing behind her wafts of either love or wisdom. Hugh Grant shows up as a
number of unsavory characters, while the main villain of the film is played, in
every section, by Hugo Weaving, who portrays, among other roles, a hitman for hire,
a Ratchet-like female nurse, and a demonic entity. But it’s Hanks who seems to
be having the most fun, playing a profanity-spewing thug out of a Guy Ritchie
movie, a sleazy doctor, a self-serving hotel receptionist, a whistleblower, an
exaggerated Jim Broadbent, and a futuristic tribesman.
But beneath the makeup and costume extravaganza, every actor
manages to create at least one palpable, memorable character with an emotional
center. By having their actors portray people of different ages, nationalities,
races, and genders, Tykwer and the Wachowskis point out the universality of the
human condition and experience, and how we are all the same when it comes to
love, despair and the desire for life and freedom.
In each story the powerful work to repress individual
freedom, and alliances which transcend social, racial, and political boundaries
are formed. The movie is made up of about equal parts hope and despair, some
scenes as airy and bright as sun-dappled clouds, others almost too wrenching to
watch. In many ways, Cloud
Atlas chronicles the struggle between opposite forces: free will and
determinism, social Darwinism and kindness, individualism and community,
freedom and suppression, submission and insurgence.
The movie is loaded with soaring themes and flights of
feeling that make it as thought-provoking as it is gorgeously photographed by
cinematographers Frank Griebe and John Toll, who, in turns, give Cloud Atlas the warm mien of intimate
tableaus of human interaction or the dark and colorful ostentation and
impersonality of an epic. Because the film, in all earnestness, is both, as
sincere and heartfelt as it is lavish and loud. The writers/directors are
concerned with the secrets of the universe as well as those, sometimes more
complicated ones, of the human heart.
Freed from the
constraints of narrative continuity, Tykwer and the Wachowski’s cinematic
mosaic functions more like music, according to its own inner rhythm and logic.
Like in a symphony, snatches of all six separate strands are laid out, changing
like variations of the same theme, echoing and amplifying each other, until
they finally come together in grand movements in which the elements merge and
form new combinations. Cloud Atlas
goes for the high notes and although it sometimes falters, for a few moments it
reaches the rarefied atmosphere of the clouds, getting as close to the sun as
anyone ever should.
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