Cloud Atlas - review

Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant character-hop through an ambitious adaptation of David Mitchell’s sprawling futuristic fantasy novel
13 August 2013

Here at last is a film that’s completely spoiler-proof. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, is a narrative extravaganza that defies summary.

It tells six different but slyly connected stories, set in 1849, about an American lawyer sailing home from the Pacific islands with an escaped slave; in 1931, about a young gay English man acting as an amanuensis to a famous older composer; in 1973, about a reporter in San Francisco investigating a nuclear power conspiracy; in the present day, about a dodgy elderly publisher trapped in a care home in Scotland; in 2144, about an enslaved clone in Neo-Seoul stirring rebellion; and lastly, in the post-apocalyptic 24th century, in Hawaii, when life has reverted to primitivism and savagery.

Okay so far? In the book, each of these stories is told in a different mode: journal, letters, noir thriller, satirical comedy, forensic examination and pidgin English. And in each successive story, a text or deed from the previous stories plays a crucial role. The novel is further ingeniously structured to be like a nest of Russian dolls — so we get the first half of each of the first five stories in chronological sequence, then the whole of the most futuristic one in the centre, then the second halves of the stories, working backwards this time.

Still with me? Good — because this is still only the most cursory description of this pottily abundant novel. It’s as if Mitchell had set out to write a book that defied adaptation. It has been adapted, in a labour of love, by Lana (formerly Larry) and Andy Wachowski, who made the Matrix trilogy, and the German director Tom Tykwer, who made Run Lola Run and Perfume.

The most trenchant decision they have taken is to run all the stories in parallel, crosscutting back and forth between each of the six strands constantly. Thus they come to crisis more or less simultaneously.

Then they have taken the quite outrageous step of having the main actors — Tom Hanks (terrible!), Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw — all play different roles in each of the strands, under masses of make-up and prosthetics. They often cross ethnicities and genders, so that Berry plays a white Jewish woman, Weaving a bullying female nurse, Sturgess a Korean, etc. Maybe such transgressions appealed to the Wachowskis after Lana’s own journey between genders?

It lends a puzzle, if not merrily pantomime, note to the movie — look, there’s Hugh Grant as a slimy oil executive, and isn’t that him again as a half-naked cannibal chief? It’s quite a treat if you’re smart about detecting actors under their roles (I’m more the type who wouldn’t recognise his own brother if he put on a false moustache out of a cracker).

I first saw this film a few months ago in Toronto, tired, not yet having read the book, and it seemed a delirium. Second time around, better prepared, its preposterousness became much more entertaining. Fantasy-fiction audiences might enjoy seeing Cloud Atlas repeatedly, I suspect, picking up more clues each time.

The Wachowskis filmed the earliest tale and the two futuristic strands while Tykwer helmed the three more contemporary stories — and it is the science-fiction component most similar to the Matrix films, about the revolt of the genetically engineered “fabricants” in a nightmarish consumer society, that works best. As Sonmi-451, Doona Bae, a pretty Korean actress in her first western role, very touching as a creature just beginning to dare to have feelings, gives the film an emotional core.

In an effort to hold this mishmash together — there are points at which you feel you are ingesting mechanically recovered narrative — the theme of “eternal recurrence” and love outlasting death is pushed too hard. What works as a literary device makes for dubious metaphysics. The young composer tops himself in the bath believing “we do not stay dead long”. In the world of Cloud Atlas he is not mistaken. Best not try this at home, though.

This incredible farrago (“a confused mass of objects or persons”) has tanked in the States. It deserves to find its own audience, though — for it’s an achievement, making a movie quite so crackers on such a big scale in the industry as it is today.

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