Jigsaw Cinema

Rating: 8/10 (12 October 2016)

How do you review a film like "Cloud Atlas"? Well, I could start by saying that it is an example of "hyperlink cinema", a style of film-making which has become popular in recent decades, especially since the turn of the millennium. Such films involve multiple story lines which are intercut with each other instead of being told sequentially. With most films of this nature, however, there is some obvious connection between the various plot lines. Altman's "Short Cuts", for example, was based upon various short stories by Raymond Carver. All the plot lines in "Traffic" were related to the illegal drugs trade, those in "Syriana" to Middle-Eastern politics and those in "The Hours" to Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs Dalloway".
"Cloud Atlas" is different. The film with which it has most in common is "Babel", which also featured apparently unrelated stories, but "Babel" only had three plot lines, all set in the present day, whereas "Cloud Atlas" has six, set in six different historical periods:-
In 1849 Adam Ewing, an American lawyer travelling between the Pacific Islands and San Francisco, tries to help Autua, a runaway slave who has stowed away on his ship.
In 1936 a young English musician named Robert Frobisher becomes amanuensis to Vyvyan Ayrs, an elderly and eccentric composer, after being expelled from Cambridge for homosexuality.
In 1973 Luisa Rey, a San Francisco journalist, finds that her life is in danger when she investigates the suspicious death of a scientist named Rufus Sixsmith.
In London in 2012 a writer murders a critic who has given his book a negative review, thus setting in motion a series of events which culminate in his publisher, Timothy Cavendish, being interned in a sinister old people's home.
In a dystopian Korea in the year 2144 Sonmi-451, a member of a despised underclass of genetically-modified humans, joins a rebellion against the corrupt society to which she belongs.
In a post-apocalyptic Hawaii in the year 2321, Zachary Bailey, a member of a primitive tribe known as the "Valleymen", encounters a more technically advanced people known as the "Prescients".
Not only do these stories appear to have little in common, they are also made in quite different styles. The first two are costume dramas, and the 1973 story is a "paranoid" thriller reminiscent of "The Pelican Brief" or "Chain Reaction". (Like those films it deals with skulduggery by high-ups in the oil industry). The 2012 story is essentially a black comedy and the last two plot lines are dealt with in a science-fiction style. The Korean one shows the strong influence of Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner"; even the name of the cloned underclass, "fabricants", recalls the similar term ("replicants") used in Scott's film. The Hawaiian story seems to have been influenced by Kevin Costner's "The Postman".
So how are these disparate strands connected? To a limited extent, by the use of recurring characters and places; Sixsmith, for example, appears as a young man in the 1936 segment- he is Frobisher's lover- and as an older one in 1973, and Ayrs' mansion later becomes the nursing home in which Cavendish stays. Another device used is that of casting the same actors in different roles in different stories, although often so well disguised as to be unrecognisable. It was pretty obvious that Jim Broadbent was playing not only Cavendish but also Ayrs and the 1849 ship's captain, and that Halle Berry was both Luisa and the Prescient woman with whom Zachary falls in love, but I didn't spot her as Ayrs' wife, probably because she was made up to look white in this section. (Several actors play characters of a different race to their own, and in one case, of a different sex). I failed to recognise Hugh Grant, normally a distinctive actor, in any of his six roles.
With so many actors playing multiple roles, there would not be room here to single out every good performance, but I think that special mention should go to Broadbent as the confused, bumbling Cavendish and the irascible old Ayrs, to Tom Hanks as Zachary and to the South Korean actress Doona Bae as the initially servile Sonmi, who gradually comes to recognise her own humanity and the criminal nature of a society which fails to respect that humanity.
Watching the film is a bit like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle. At first we are confronted with what looks like a mass of confused fragments and then, as we start to put them together, a bigger picture starts to emerge and we realise that there are indeed links between all six segments. I won't set out what all those links are, but the most important one is the thematic link of revolt against, or liberation from, some form of slavery, imprisonment or oppression. Autua and Sonmi are enslaved in the most literal sense. Cavendish and Frobisher are both held against their will in the same building, the former by physical restraint and the latter by blackmail. Zachary and his people are oppressed by an aggressive race known as the Kona. Luisa fights against the tyranny of corrupt people in high places. As the film reaches its end we realise how people in one era have inspired those in the next when faced with similar problems and we eventually see the complete picture. The film has divided critical opinion, but from my point of view it succeeds beautifully. 8/10