Art Or Entertainment? Truly In The Eyes And Ears Of The Beholders

Rating: 4/10 (2 November 2012)

While I have come to value IMDb.com for the wealth of information it offers on the world of film, the many high rankings for Cloud Atlas were another reminder that the site too often elicits views from those easily impressed with the ephemera of epic attempts at film entertainment without looking for the real artistic depth that makes a great film. Like the hugely inflated rankings for Inception (a film that I also ranked at four stars), Cloud Atlas is a picture that tries hard (harder even) to be too many things, ultimately relying on too many cool visuals, popular faces, and dumbed-down feel-good philosophizing to make its point.
Now that I have thoroughly alienated myself from many readers for what could be seen as the inherently condescending/pretentious view of a middle-aged professional reviewer, I may as well heighten your outrage by noting that longer experience with the tools of film, and storytelling tends to leave you with a more discerning critical apparatus.
Don't get me wrong, I wanted to like this movie. I love a well-made epic, I was fascinated with David Mitchell's take on the pomo-novel, and I believe that the film's directing team came to the material with good intentions (I even liked the first Matrix movie). The art direction and use of CGI technology is excellent, and their choice to juxtapose the competing plots of the different stories in a more basic parallel fashion than the novel was probably the only way to attempt an adaptation. A couple of the separate stories actually work well enough in a stand-alone way. But the best intentions can still go awry. Perhaps this novel simply shouldn't't have been adapted to film at all.
Fact is, there are so many things wrong with this movie that you would have to sit down with your finger on the play/pause button of a DVD player in order to list them all. I'm not going to take the time to do that but...
Mitchell's novel is a challenging work that does not dumb down the central insights in the way that the directorial team has with their incessant platitudes and those oh-so knowing looks on actor's faces that figure repeatedly in attempts at profundity. I hope the author got a hefty fee for the film rights to Cloud Atlas, which would help him from cringing too much at the final product.
Then there's the issue of casting famous and not-so-famous faces. At times the quick edits from one story to another left me rolling my eyes, especially at Tom Hanks' one-dimensional earnestness, Halle Berry's affected concern, and Hugo Weaving's oh-so-predictable expressions of evil. Kudos to Jim Broadbent for being the only prominent name who is convincing - (maybe because he got to handle the funnier stuff?), along with rising stars Jim Sturgess, James D'Arcy and Ben Whishaw. Doona Bae impressed me too except that some of her lines in some of the most important moments were virtually unintelligible.
As for Hugh Grant, take satisfaction in the fact that he is usually so covered in latex as to be unrecognizable. Yes folks, there's enough latex here to keep a condom factory rolling for months, but all that latex and exotic henna designs on faces still can't disguise when it's old "awe-shucks" Forrest Gump underneath the rubber, especially when Hanks mangles one accent after another, scene after painful scene. It's such a shame that big films like this have to feature a few Hollywood names to get the production money. Like Jack Nicholson, Hanks is one of those names who just comes off as himself, trying however valiantly to inhabit a character he's not suited to.
Halle Berry is more of a hollow presence, though for a few moments in her scenes with Keith David things hint temptingly at the aura of '70s Blacksploitation movies. Susan Sarandon is just simply a waste of Susan Sarandon. She could be strolling some red carpet event for all the weight she gets to show in this picture, with almost no lines to speak.
Sarandon's bit-part also highlights the poor integration of minor characters in the sprawling mish-mash of periods and places that are thrown together. I pity anyone who hasn't read the book just for the basic understanding it would bring to explaining certain scenes (such as Adam Ewing's return from Asia near the end). Without that, some scenes would be completely meaningless.
At nearly three hours the film is at once too long and too short: long in the rudimentary way it tries to drill home the central thread that "everything is connected" (did the directors do too much acid?), and short because it would take a mini-series to really penetrate the deeper nuances of character that you get in the novel. Of course one expects the film to be a different thing than the book. It's a completely different medium, but the real fault here is in the tone.
A truly great film would have led each individual viewer to make their own connections to the various themes and parallel story lines, but this movie has to nail them home for us.
Call me a curmudgeon, but if you haven't seen Cloud Atlas, don't trust all those younger, more easily impressed viewers who ranked it at 8, 9 or 10. Sorry kids, but it doesn't come close. Learn something about film history before you try to argue how it deserves such accolades.
At best, the film looks good and offers a couple of well-told tales interwoven in the rest of the mess. At worst, the landscape is defined too simplistically. The atmosphere in this atlas is too thin, and not cloudy enough for my imagination.