Every once in a while a movie comes along that bends reality and asks probing questions about humanity. The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix achieved cult status for blending philosophical questions with science fiction innovation and a visceral tale of revolution. In Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, those questions were of determinism and the repercussions of small actions. Now all three directors have come together to make Cloud Atlas, tackling similarly ambitious questions with the curiosity and imagination infused in their previous works.
The central premise of the movie, based on David Mitchell’s eponymous 2004 bestseller, is that human beings recur throughout time. The same souls whirl through history and weave into each other’s lives, and “an act of kindness ripples across centuries” (says the movie’s tagline) in poetic patterns of retribution and rebirth. The concept’s simplest form appears in many a religion and philosophy, from the Greek’s palingenesis to Buddhism’s Karma and Rebirth,to the Jewish Gilgal, but here it takes on a life of its own. In six nesting vignettes, we see the same people in multiple eras cross and re-cross each other path’s “like figure skaters.” A character from one timeline reads a previous one’s diary, or one story is turned into a movie in the life of a later character. The six arcs simultaneously crafted throughout the movie are a tasting menu of genres, showcasing the period piece, the detective story, the sci-fi dystopia, the meta-comedy, and many others. A man on a nineteenth century ship is poisoned by a greedy doctor; a composer furiously writes his opus, the Cloud Atlas Sextet in the pre-WWII era; and a reporter in the 1970s investigates a shady nuclear reactor. In the present, a publisher gets trapped in an old-age home, while in the future, a clone escapes her dystopian beginnings to start a revolution, and a goat-herder fights for survival in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii. These characters are linked by a shared mystical birthmark and their stories web together in a way that transcends time and space. Only multiple viewings of the film can reveal the intricate symbols that snake through every frame like delicate clockwork.
Adapting such a complex novel to the screen must have been a daunting task. First of all the directors decided on casting the same actors in multiple roles, to clearly show the mystical recurrence that’s vital to the movie. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Korean film star Doona Bae, and numerous others, all give appearances in every story, their skin variously colored, their voices in differing dialects, their facial features morph like taffy, and their bodies shifted and outfitted in inventive outerwear that’s sure to garner mention during awards season. Berry herself is a reporter, a futuristic foreign emissary, a white German Jewish woman, an Indian party guest, and a stooped male doctor with a cyborg eyepatch. Hanks shows up as a jittery Scottish writer, a homicidal doctor with chipmunk teeth, and a half-mad peasant speaking a futuristic pidgin, among others. Half of the movie I spent trying to figure out which familiar Hollywood face was under the masterful latex prosthetics.
The small riddles that slyly populate the movie offer much fodder for discussion, but the movie’s overarching spectacle is even more successful, in creating a cohesive tapestry from multivarious threads. Ostensibly, the elephant in the cutting room was how to tease a convincing gestalt from six often disparate stories. How to make a movie that is, in effect, six movies? Of the six segments, three are directed by Mr. Tykwer and three by the Wachowskis, but they’re all edited into each other, first with brief snatches of each story in the movie’s prologue, then with longer expository segments. That was a strong stylistic departure from the novel, which introduces each story chronologically in its first half, and then resolves them backwards in its second. The trade-off is that the movie sometimes seems peripatetic and often saps the tension from climactic moments by switching narratives mid-scene. But a chronological script, or a trimmer one for that matter, would have divested the story of its oomph, and the overarching pathos more than made up for any frayed edges in the quilting.
Before its creation, Cloud Atlas the film was often seen as a pipe dream of the Wachowskis’. The story was considered unfilmable because of its complexity and narrative diversity, and its $100 million production costs, though not gigantic by Hollywood standards, were shunned by mainstream studios. Even the Wachowski’s considerable post-Matrix celebrity was insufficient to gather studio approval. So the intrepid directors resorted to independent funding, including a $20 million loan from the government of Germany, where large sequences of the film were shot. While this makes Cloud Atlas one of the most expensive indie films ever made, it also shows that its makers, like many artists of other mediums, felt they had something to say, that their resonance with the story could be translated for a mass-market audience into a work of surpassing ambition. Some viewers may find Cloud Atlas unwieldy, or overly long- but, like one of its characters, I found myself retracing my footsteps, returning again and again to its thematic beauty. Something within the story’s DNA, epic in its sweep and cosmic in its proportions, gives this film vision and a towering achievement of cinematic spectacle.