Review: 'Cloud Atlas'

BY MICHAEL SMITH World Scene Writer
Friday, October 26, 2012
10/26/12 at 5:28 AM

Ambitious and audacious, "Cloud Atlas" and its everything-is-connected tale of past lives affecting future lives is so epic that its messiness and confusion seem of a larger scale, as well.

It was never going to be a simple task turning David Mitchell's brain-teasing novel into a motion picture, with its storytelling stretching across cultures, continents and centuries, and now with stars like Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant playing multiple characters in multiple eras and even multiple genders.

But these tales that fit like nesting dolls as the book unfolds are simplified in the film's script so as to make their complex stories clumsy and confusing. This is one of those cases in which you can easily imagine this project as having room to breathe as a miniseries or as a pay-cable series.

"Cloud Atlas" is about nothing less than our lives and how they affect other lives down the road, perhaps even our own future lives. At 172 minutes and wearing thin by that third hour, the movie feels like it lasts a lifetime.

Boredom sets in as plot points that should be utterly unpredictable too often become cliched.

The film is large enough that it has three directors and screenwriters, with the Wachowski siblings (Andy and Lana, makers of "The Matrix" movies) and Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") commandeering various vignettes of the giant story.

Their task is to illustrate how one's actions can affect the lives of those in the present and future to the degree that, for example, a single act of kindness in one time period can affect a revolution 300 years later.

The filmmakers re-create the six puzzle-piece stories from Mitchell's book, constantly rearranging their order in the storytelling and lasting from a few minutes to a few seconds as need be to highlight the connecting narrative threads.

There is the historical fiction of an 1849 diary of a Pacific Ocean voyage; the melodrama of a young man creating a musical masterpiece, related in letters from the composer to his friend in the 1930s; that same friend is caught up in a 1970s drama of murders connected to a proposed nuclear power plant; the modern-day farce of a publisher trapped in a nursing home against his will; the science-fiction mysteries of a rebellious clone in 2144 Korea; and a tribe living in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

Various actors play leading roles in the tales of the ocean voyage (Jim Sturgess), the composer (Ben Whishaw), the nuclear plant (Berry as an investigative reporter), the publisher (Jim Broadbent), the clone (Doona Bae) and the tribesman (Hanks).

The important fact to note - as the film builds its case of philosophical and scientific speculation, with rich detail as to period art direction and impressive Wachowski space-tastic societies - is that we see these actors pop up as different people (or the same people? Hmmm ...) in roles both large and small in the other stories. The connecting threads can be tenuous (the composer finds the 1849 diary and is inspired by it), but watch for them in each vignette.

Sometimes you may not be able to tell which actor is hiding under the makeup (I couldn't in some cases until the end credits). This is because the work is that good and that bad. The film's extensive makeup effects ranged from accomplished to amusing to pancake-gooey.

I can say that I will never forget seeing Hugo Weaving made up as a nursing home matron who would make Nurse Ratched cry for her mama. It's a creepy, gender-bending image, and it's not the only one.

The bottom-line is that the Oscar-winners, Hanks and Berry, interact in the film's scenes the most, and they surprisingly have so little chemistry that the filmmakers efforts are made moot from the start.

This fact and the confusing back-and-forth of the storytelling - if you haven't read the book, good luck making sense of everything - renders "Cloud Atlas" a movie about making connections that feels seriously disconnected.

Any chance at success mandated that this picture have a strong emotional and romantic pull for the audience, but no sparks flew.

Because of that - and I'm an old softie in these regards - I found "Cloud Atlas" lacking in heart and soul.

‘CLOUD ATLAS’

Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess

Theaters: Cinemark Tulsa (in IMAX also), AMC Southroads 20, Cinemark Broken Arrow, Starworld 20

Running time: 2 hours, 52 minutes

Rated: R (violence, language, sexuality/ nudity and some drug use)

Quality: