A panorama of narratives

Rating: 7/10 (4 November 2012)

Warning! This review contains spoilersÂ…
What one would most certainly expect to find in a Tom Tykwer and Wachowski brothers collaboration is style. Tykwer, known notably for the stylized and stylish Run Lola Run,and the Wachowskis for the iconic Matrix trilogy, do not disappoint in that department. Cloud Atlas is nothing if not stylish. Amazing cinematography and art direction realize that style on screen. The directors use the space of the big screen to create a panoramic canvas of events and characters bound together inexorably in a larger order of things and in a way viewers of the Matrix films will identify well.
Like the Matrix films, where the postmodern, Baudrilardian notion of reality combines (increasingly confusingly) with ancient Eastern notions of destiny and karma as an underlying theme, strong elements of both Western and Eastern philosophy underlie and bind together the stories in Cloud Atlas.
The film is a collage of stories separated by space and time. It features delightful performances by the A-list of Hollywood and beyond: Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Sturgess (remember Across the Universe?), Ben Whishaw (going places by also bagging the role of Q in the new Bond movie) and many others, and is an actors' delight. When, for example, was the last time Hugh Grant came out of his blinking and stammering very British persona to play a cannibalistic warlord and a Japanese businessman? The film traces many lives and their stories from the 19th century to the 21st and beyond. The underlying theme is both Western and Gandhian: that every human being has the power to affect generations through their choices and actions; that every human action, no matter how seemingly trivial or small, has repercussions beyond their own surroundings and lives. Therefore, every individual has the capacity to do good or evil through their actions, which affect a host of others for the better or worse. This is evident in the way actions in each story affect those in others. There seems to be a second connection between the stories in the sense that the same actor appears as a different person in a different space and time. This is most clear in Tom Hanks' stories, where he is seen wearing a talisman made from a stone that one of his characters had stolen from someone many centuries ago. Does this imply the directors' belief in rebirth and karma? That one person, having harmed another at one time, is given a chance to redeem themselves? Or, once a bad apple, always a bad apple (a curse afflicting Hugo Weaving's characters)? Adapted from David Mitchell's novel of the same name (Can anybody who's read it tell me how the movie compares?), the film is ambitious, well acted and conceptualized in great detail. That's what keeps viewers from losing interest across a maze of stories whose connections appear puzzling for the better part of the three-hour running time. And just when the connections begin to be clear, the directors decide to nail the philosophy into viewers' heads and become didactic. Therefore, the film becomes interesting rather than sublime in the end unlike Kubrick's 2001, made on a similarly panoramic canvas and highly philosophical, but which leaves a lot to interpretation.
Perhaps the directors wanted to explicitly bring together the many stories being told simultaneously because they felt viewers might be confused. Indeed, one gets a sense of too much happening, yet too little. There is not enough time to do full justice to all the stories at play: each one is a mini-movie in itself and deserves that attention. So viewers have little time to engage with the characters and the stories and have to keep flitting from one story to another, wondering all the time how they are supposed to be connected. One reviewer of this film suggested, and I agree, that this should be reworked as a miniseries to give that reel (or digital!) space to every story and character. I hope the directors are paying heed.