**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski
by Walter Chaw It speaks to the
extraordinary hubris of the tripartite godhead behind Cloud Atlas (the
Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) that in the middle of a 172-minute film composed of
interminable exposition and multiple timelines, they would invoke
long-winded Russian prisoner Solzhenitsyn without fear of ironic reprisal.
More, it speaks to their hubris that they would make a film this sprawling and
messianic about the Disney maxim that you're never too puny to change the
world, so don't stop trying, tiger! If you're at all offended by white
people doing the "ah, so" thing in yellow-face, by the way: relax,
because there're also white people doing the evil Fu Manchu thing in
yellow-face. What there isn't is white people doing blackface, suggesting that
if you're about to make the argument that Cloud Atlas is about how we're
all the same under the skin to the extent that we could have been different
races in past and future lives, then don't bother. That doesn't stop the movie,
though, from talking about the evils of slavery with a super-duper,
plantation-attitudes-changing Magic Negro, or from positing a future-Korea that
clones wage-slaves before paying off never-accidental post-modern
self-referents. If you were to take Cloud Atlas remotely seriously,
in fact, you'd have to address it as an attempt to create a completely
post-modern artifact in a world that didn't already have "Beavis &
Butthead". Quick, look, the author of that manuscript the old editor in
the 2012 timeline is reading was written by the kid from the 1973 timeline who had a crush
on one of the black versions of Halle Berry (the one playing Pam Grier)! Did I
mention that Berry has a timeline in whiteface? Or that Hugo Weaving and
Ben Whishaw have ones in drag?
Rather than detail the
various story arcs, better to say that each sees otherwise-inconsequential
people deciding at some point to do something with their lives. Cloud Atlas
is about taking chances and leaving a legacy–an idea that John Ford expressed
more eloquently, and wordlessly, with a pebble creating a ripple at the
beginning of a lovely thirty-second sequence in Young Mr. Lincoln, 73
years ago. The picture is also about how the same people continue to intersect
with one another across centuries in myriad incarnations, a conceit done
elegantly in one timeline in which Tom Hanks, in a bad blonde wig (no, not that
one–the one that looks like a Ken doll), falls in love with a black Halle
Berry and wonders how he could have, given that he's just met her. If you really want an entire movie about that, I recommend Dead Again. Or any of
the Draculas. Or that episode of "The X Files" that
makes me cry. There's also an Aeon Flux timeline with beautiful clone
Sonmi-451 (the incomparable Doona Bae), who, right before her sex scene, says
in an adorable Oriental accent, "It is forbidden," making me flash back
to Richard Chamberlain and "Shogun", not to mention those '90s phone-sex
commercials promising that Asian women possess secrets of foh-biddun pleasure. It's made immeasurably worse, of course, that the man she's about to fuck is a Korean underground soldier played by Jim Sturgess in Teahouse of the August
Moon makeup. And then there's the future-shock thread that plays like the
lovechild of Cast Away and Neil Marshall's Doomsday as Tom Hanks, doing his best backwoods idiot Nell, leads an Eloi (Halle Berry, still
black) up the side of a haunted mountain to Contact a lost tribe in a Blade
Runner off-world.
Cloud Atlas is that occasional flick doomed to be damned with faint praise (it's
so…committed! and, and…earnest!) and defended by charges of
critics not understanding it. In one timeline, editor Jim Broadbent reassures
his bellicose client (Tom Hanks, doing Bob Hoskins for some reason) that
critics only read "quickly and arrogantly" before said client
launches a critic off a balcony to his bloody, audience-approved demise. It's
ironic for Cloud Atlas to go after critics, because they comprise the
largest demographic of people who might possibly catch all the pop-cultural
signposts left there for the audience like a trail of DayGlo breadcrumbs. At
the end of the day, the biggest tragedy of the picture isn't that it's a giant,
vapid mess of small ideas masquerading as big ones–no, the biggest tragedy is
that German co-director Tykwer, whose extraordinary The Princess and the Warrior and Perfume remain unavailable on Blu-ray in the United States, continues to struggle to find material worthy of
him.
It's tempting to
applaud the film's audacity, but beyond volume and galleries of bad makeup,
accents, and noses, all it really is is a pat portmanteau trading in tired
master-plots and their mildly-uplifting resolutions. "What is an ocean but
a collection of drops?" asks a character who sees the light while
everyone else is kicked out of the piece entirely as they try to figure out
whether that's Hugh Grant under the fright makeup this time or just Weaving
again as The Mysterious Wu Fang (or Warwick Davis's leprechaun). Warning
enough? Susan Sarandon's in it. No? How 'bout the dialogue where it appears they're actually defending Carlos Castenada? Why not Richard Bach? James
Redfield? The biggest mystery of Cloud Atlas is that there are enough nice moments (most of them in the stories of the composer and the clone) to make this a not-total disaster. There's evidence here that the
Wachowskis are gifted, but they haven't made anything truly great since Bound.
There, I said it. Follow Walter Chaw on Twitter
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Awesome I’m looking forward to tedious arguments about race where I’m a bad person because I have a problem with white actors donning the racial makeup and I shouldn’t because it’s an artistic choice about how we’re all human, maaan.
Too bad they didn’t go all out and throw some blackface in there. Speaking of which, am I the only one who’s seeing a resurgence in blackface? Yellowface never went away and now if I want to see some blackface, all I have to do is watch the Oscars.
Why not just have different actors portray the variations of the same characters? Certainly through certain mannerisms and dialog we’d realize they’re the same people. Putting actors in awful makeup and wigs just distracts. That said, I’ll give it a shot. I think the music in the trailer (is it actually from the film?) is faking me into wanting to see the film.
Pity. I loved the book, a virtuoso feat in literary ventriloquism by David Mitchell. Read it almost 5 years ago, so I may be a little fuzzy on the details but to the best of my recollection,the book wasn’t about the interconnectivity of people through the ages but themes, so this idea of casting severely limited actors like Hanks and Berry in multiple roles is a strange one, more so when Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers are still available for that shit.
Terrific review – can you remember which episode of the X-Files that is, by the way?
I could tell from the trailer it looked embarassing. I don’t get Tom Hanks anymore.
I think Walter’s talking about “Love: The Field Where I Died” from the fourth season.
“That doesn’t stop the movie, though, from talking about the evils of slavery with a super-duper, plantation-attitudes-changing Magic Negro…”
Isn’t this too a form of racism? In this assertion you’ve reduced AUTUA’s character to a mere stand-in for the previous racists stereotype of the Magic Negro.
How exactly does he fit this role?
He is a seaman with skills, he tells Ewing this. Ewing saves his life which he in turn repays by pointing out the obvious to everyone but Ewing that Hanks’ doctor is poisoning him thus saving his life.
Where is he a Magic Negro?
Doesn’t this same line of logic continue to confirm that race is valid just because it has widespread acceptance? I mean, come on, race is a cultural construct used to enslave people. Period. It has NO scientific value. Doesn’t mocking it without critiquing it’s false roots reinforce it?
I am curious for more dialogue on this after people have seen it. The movie is flawed and mawkish in some of its sentiments but maybe it will expand a dialogue on what the concept of race really is – slavery justified through a false ideology.
“Look at him go! He’s got fish hooks for feet, yeaaarrrhh!”
race race race; this stuff is coming to head in America, especially with the election. Alot of people are just looking for a fight
Nothing like a critic scorned. Why don’t you admit that you could never make something has ambitious as this, because you’d have to crawl out of your basement, you big baby. Mwah!. You’re a critic! ha! ha! The fim-makers got it right!
This film struck me as the improbable marriage of The Fountain and Seven Faces of Dr. Lao — although the former did a better job of cross-cutting between eras over swelling strings (with campy conviction, of course) and the latter doesn’t dilute the dubious pleasure of costume changes with half-baked philosophy (give or take the speech they recited when Joel escaped Mystery Science Theater) .