REVIEW: Cloud Atlas

Directed By: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski

Story 1: 1849, The South Pacific Seas

A disease-inflicted American lawyer (Jim Sturgess), slowly being poisoned to death by an opportunistic medical man (Tom Hanks) in a sea-faring ship, is fighting with the tyrannical aristocratic ship-officials (Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving) for the freedom of a black stow-away slave (David Gyasi).

David Gyasi and Jim Sturges

Story 2: 1936, Scotland

A brilliant young composer (Ben Whishaw) apprentices himself with a retired world-renowned composer (Jim Broadbent) to make a name for himself, all the while trying to write his masterpiece “The Cloud Atlas Sextet” and communicating with his gay lover (James D’Arcy).

Ben Whishaw and James D'Arcy

Story 3: 1973, San Francisco

A hard-knuckled female journalist (Halle Berry) is trying to blow the lid off the corrupt dealings at a nuclear plant owned by a greedy industrialist (Hugh Grant) with the help of his repenting former employees (James D’Arcy, Tom Hanks) all the while trying to escape the clutches of a brutal hitman (Hugo Weaving).

Halle Berry

Story 4: 2012, England

A small-time publisher (Jim Broadbent), trapped by his vengeful estranged brother (Hugh Grant) in a despotic old-age-home, is trying to plot his escape by duping the ruthless old-age-home orderlies (Hugo Weaving, James D’Arcy).

Jim Broadbent

Story 5: 2144, Neo Seoul

A genetically engineered young slave (Doona Bae), confesses to a government official (James D’Arcy) before her execution, about her failed bid to lead a rebellion to free her kind from the shackles of slavery with the help of a sympathetic young revolutionary (Jim Sturgess).

Jim Sturgess and Doona Bae

Story 6: 2321, Hawaii

After a planetary cataclysm that has returned most of humanity to the savage lifestyle of per-historic time, a goatherd (Tom Hanks), haunted by the devil (Hugo Weaving), leads a surviving member of the remaining technologically advanced civilization (Halle Berry) up to a transmitter on a mountain where she sends a signal to colonies in space to rescue them from a dying earth.

Halle Berry and Tom Hanks

These are the six stories which, in a daring feat of narrative engineering, directors Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski cross cut through breathlessly, giving the sense of an interconnected unified whole. What they are doing here is not unprecedented – recent Best Picture nominees Crash and Babel attempted to do the same, cutting across multiple stories unfolding in different locations. But they were all unfolding within the same time-frame, thus Cloud Atlas distinguishes itself from them. The Hours, another ‘recent’ Best Picture nominee, went a step further, and cross cut across both multiple locations and multiple time-frames. But Cloud Atlas is yet different from The Hours as The Hours was rigorously disciplined and united the three stories with precise thematic parallels and conformities. Cloud Atlas is a free lark in comparison, its multiple stories are entirely distinct and you have to go all the way back to D. W. Griffith’ Intolerance in 1916 to find such a conceit attempted at a comparable scale. That early similarly expensive film ambitiously cut between four vastly disparate stories across varied time-frames and locations, Cloud Atlas ups the ante by raising the number to six.

That Cloud Atlas’s central conceit had been attempted nearly 100 years ago does not diminish its novelty one bit. It is still an independently produced, 3 hour, R Rated, epic costing 100 Million Dollars – as mind boggling a gamble as any in this day and age. And for that alone, it deserves our attention as being a paean to artistic integrity, vision and refusal to compromise.

Inspite of the screenplay being adapted, the narrative structure was not easily laid out for the film-makers/writers. The book while containing six stories presents each of them as separate entities and does not toggle back and forth between them. The toggling back and forth between stories, a distinctly cinematic bit of narrative grammar, was dreamed up by the film-makers themselves. Not content with this intimidating challenge, the film-makers yet upped the ante, coming up with their most original concoction, and certainly the most preposterous and mind-boggling one, of having the same core group of actors play characters across multiple stories. So now the connections are not just established through references and editing, but through casting too! This is meta-meta-meta.

This ambitious enterprise, though wildly successful in transcending the skull-crushing logistics of such an endeavor, is less successful in imparting meaning to all the inter-connectedness that it so strains for. There is no profundity or message at the core of it save “Everything is connected”. That’s it. It might seem diminishing for a movie of such epic purport to sprawl across millennia and the entire globe to arrive at “Everything is connected”, a maxim that is deeply questionable in the first place and pseudo-spiritual to boot, but I’ll take it anyways.

You can be entirely indifferent to the ‘message’ of the movie and still wallow in its abundant film-making pleasures, as I did. Each of the six stories is a single complete perfectly defined unit, designed like a standalone movie and bringing to bear all the production values afforded by a multi-million dollar budget. It might be the perfect movie for the ADD riddled generation who are perhaps inclined to switch channels and jump dementedly between different programs, only here, the movie itself does it for them - a little romance here, a little sci-fi there, an action scene in one story, an emotional one in another.

The movie’s most consistent pleasure is to be had in its ‘montage’ or editing. The six stories by themselves are unremarkable (save perhaps Story 3 and 5), but cross cut as they are here, the interest in them is increased tenfold. This is one of the most telling cases of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. The movie brashly cuts across the stories, making it a pleasurable intellectual pursuit to follow each of them to their conclusion. The movie is entirely engrossing because of this through its longish running time and consists of several mini-climaxes where two or three stories at a time reach a particularly thrilling and exciting moment and the movie cross cuts between them giving you the suspense of cliff-hangers but also offering you release only minutes later.

Also entertaining is how narration is used. Each of the six stories has the lead character narrating something. But the movie is edited in such a way that narrative audio from one story might be over-lapped with the images from another story. Seriously, this movie is meta-meta-meta-meta.

The performances are one with the piece and the actors had enough on their plates already with the dis-orienting trick of enacting multiple characters, races, genders across different stories to worry about crafting full dimensional people in the limited runtime they were afforded. Still Ben Whishaw, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae and Jim Broadbent rise above the rest to create lasting impressions.

I look forward to seeing it again, as its structure intrigues me yet. I want to see how the stories fit together, where do they cut from one story to another. This is a bravura achievement in narrative rhythm and commands respect (whatever might be its thematic damp squibs) just for that.

4/5