Portmanteau poem

Rating: 10/10 (23 February 2013)

With a tone of told-you-so pomposity, "folly" is the go-to term used by professional critics with regard to risky big-budget films with disappointing box office returns. Cloud Atlas is no folly. Yes, it is vast in architecture and ambition, but it is also profound and lyrical. I wonder if those journalists who dismiss it as pretentious and/or shallow and focus on mocking its prosthetics shouldn't revisit the idea of what film is for, and remember the art of suspending disbelief in the service of the imagination.
David Mitchell's novel (which I've not read) has been adapted for the screen by three writer-directors: Andy and Lana Wachowski, of The Matrix and Bound fame, and Tom Tykwer, most famous for the films Perfume and Run Lola Run. (Like a modern-day John Carpenter, Twyker also worked as composer on Cloud Atlas.) Together they've created a three-hour movie composed of myriad stories spanning different time periods. The actors - Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Wishaw, Jim Broadbent et al - each play different characters throughout these stories, regardless of age, race or gender. It's a conceit that works because it is a film about the connectedness of humanity, and it embraces its own preposterousness with a consistent joviality.
At three hours, the film is never dull. In fact, if anything, I felt some sequences could have done with some fleshing out. Perhaps a five- hour director's cut is on the cards. The stories are spliced together, often overlapping in dialogue and incident, and the effect is beguiling yet coherent. A portmanteau film is only as good as its weakest story, and thankfully none of the stories are weak. Even the most generic fable - "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", set upon the high seas of the pre-Thirteenth Amendment Americas - gets its moment, providing the film with its affecting finale.
As the stories unfold, one becomes aware that they not only linked by blood but also by theme: the freedom of the individual against the backdrop of the freedom of civilisations. A shambling breakout from an old people's home (with Hugo Weaving as a Nurse Ratched-esque overseer) is offered equal triumph to a hoverbike escape from a 22nd century Neo Seoul in the throes of a fascist lockdown. The secular free will of our species - what some would call a "human spirit" - transcends time and space and the arbitrary genetic borders it is in our nature to overcome.
Cloud Atlas is the kind of rampant, deliriously overreaching cinema whose story is felt as much as it is followed. You'll find flaws abundant (the filmmakers do trample the line between ideas and gimmickry at times), but every one is vanquished by a shot or line or scene that lands perfectly on its feet. Besides, with a tapestry this broad and elegant, it's not about the individual stitches, it's about the dazzling whole.