Cloud Atlas: puzzling, dazzling, discombobulating

Cloud Atlas

Released 22^nd February 2013

Who would have thought one film could contain such a confusing cumulonimbus of character concoctions? Directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have tried to translate David Mitchell’s epic novel into a digestible film, and their success is mixed. Cloud Atlas can feel like a daunting thousand-piece jigsaw, with seemingly unconnected fragments that must be painstakingly fitted together without the conviction you’ll ever quite get the full picture. But it can also be a beautifully rich tapestry, woven from a giddying array of genres and across many epochs, its threads interweaving to tell thrilling tales through a smorgasbord of ideas and intricate details.

Those character concoctions are the directors’ audacious filmic solution to the six-part structure of Mitchell’s novel. Each actor is reincarnated in different roles, sporting impressive prosthetics through which their acting calibre can (mostly) still shine through. So we witness Halle Berry as a gritty 1970's journalist, a silver-wreathed oracle from the future and even (only just believably) the white Jewish wife of a composer in 1930's Edinburgh. The most startling reincarnation is Hugh Grant, who plays a series of rather preposterous villains including an unexpectedly convincing, bloodcurdling cannibal.

The brilliance of the film, for someone who has read the book, is that the directors have taken a seemingly impossible combination of plots and made them exhilarating and surprisingly resonant. Themes of retribution, subjugation and accountability are nicely teased out – occasionally the script is too obvious, which I think is why some critics have accused the film of vapidity. But Cloud Atlas does have something to say about how your actions affect those around you, what your legacy will be when you’re gone, and questioning what freedom really means and whether any of us truly achieve it. And it does this with such style and technological daring that you cannot but be impressed.

Prolific links between the narratives, from theme to plot to subtle camera angle cuts, are revealed with breathtaking dexterity. One such tense moment intercuts between two scenes: a black runaway slave tightrope-walks the ship’s rigging to prove his worth to hostile, murderous sailors below; and a futuristic battle is fought on a precipitous sky-high walkway by rebels rescuing a genetically-engineered clone from perpetual servitude. The inevitability of enslaver and enslaved is made palpable as every camera angle is mirrored, reminding us of the ominously repetitive nature of humanity's flaws.

But watching the film with someone who hadn’t read the book did raise the question: without an anchoring knowledge of Mitchell’s more clearly divided narratives, would you understand what on earth is going on? The hasty cuts between scenes can be bewildering and take serious concentration to follow. There is also the temptation to play the ‘who’s who’ game – the prosthetics may be remarkable (and admirably racially non-discriminatory) but they are sometimes artificial to the point of farce – Hugh Grant as a geriatric cockney geezer and Hugo Weaving as an ostensibly Korean bad guy spring to mind. More time can be spent deliberating about, marvelling or laughing at the metamorphoses of these famous actors than paying attention to the earnest film the directors have tried to make.

Mitchell’s novel has a wonderful capacity to absorb you in six discrete worlds, each with their own inimitable voice in which you completely invest before moving on to the next. Each is disorientatingly different but immediately hypnotic. By intercutting the characters' tales, the directors have achieved a distinct kind of dramatic intensity but lost some of the novel’s immersive quality and some of its coherence. It takes time to appreciate fully a tapestry of this ambition and intricacy, weaved of such multifarious threads. And perhaps the medium of film, by its very nature, can never allow enough time to devote to such complexity. But the threads are beautiful nonetheless, and I think it is worth the 172 minutes to entwine yourself in the exquisite stories they spin. 

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