Any discussion of the crazily ambitious Cloud Atlas must begin with its story, which is actually six stories, each nested within the next like Matryoshka dolls. The first tale concerns Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess), a naïve American ailing during a South Pacific sea voyage in the mid-19th century. In the 1930s, Adam’s diary is read by Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), an ambitious English musician serving as amanuensis to an elderly composer (Jim Broadbent). Robert’s letters to his lover (James D’arcy) fall into the hands of 1970s muckraking reporter Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), who is sniffing around a shady nuclear power plant. Rey’s tale is recounted in a manuscript sent to Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent again), a sad-sack publisher who becomes trapped in a nursing home in 2012 while fleeing an enraged mobster (Tom Hanks). In 22nd century Neo-Seoul, Cavendish’s plight appears in a film watched by genetically engineered “replicant” Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), who becomes a rallying figure for a revolutionary movement. Finally, on Hawaii in the post-apocalyptic distant future, a hologram recorded by Sonmi is viewed by the primitive goatherd Zachry (Hanks again) at a stronghold where he has reluctantly guided an advanced “prescient” (Berry again).
Got that? If Cloud Atlas accomplishes nothing else, it demonstrates that daunting narrative complexity is no obstacle to coherent, engaging filmmaking, at least when the filmmakers are as confident as co-directors Lana and Andy Wachowksi (The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). David Mitchell’s novel of the same name proceeds through its onion-layer storylines methodically. Cloud Atlas the Film, meanwhile, is a vigorously cinematic creature, cutting relentlessly across its sextet of interlocking tales to create aesthetic and thematic reverberations. Despite the breathless hopscotching through time and space, however, the film sustains a striking tone of mystery and incipient calamity over its nearly-three-hour running time, owing in no small part to a stirring score and the herculean work of editor Alexander Berner.
This is not to say that Cloud Atlas is a wholly (or even mostly) successful film. Like the Wachowskis’ The Matrix Trilogy, the film traffics in Buddhist-Lite statements of faux-profundity while proffering unearned, aggressively earnest pathos. Little support is provided by the performers, whose work generally ranges from forgettably functional to outright dreadful. The filmmakers’ questionable choice to cast the same actors in all six periods necessitates some distracting makeup effects; the Dr. No-like “yellowface” applied to the white actors for the Neo-Seoul sequences is especially unpleasant. Elsewhere, other off-putting goofiness abounds, as in the laughable Jar Jar Binks argot spoken in the post-apocalyptic storyline. Yet for all its flaws, Cloud Atlas has a kind of wobbly magnificence. It never feels compromised or trivial, and as conventional as its sentimentalism can be, its empathetic and liberation-fueled moral landscape has a refreshing clarity. Moreover, the film wryly acknowledges its own manipulative nature as a work of melodrama, as well as the glib, phony bent to its social criticisms. It may by unforgivably gooey and unintentionally silly, but Cloud Atlas is self-evidently the exact film Wachowskis and Tywker wanted to make: a glorious mess of an epic about the fluidity of history and the recurring ethical conundrums of the human experience.
