Lana and Andy Wachowski, Tom Tykwer (2012)

The novel is a tough read but what kept me going – as well as increasingly bloody-minded determination to finish the thing – was how David Mitchell develops and holds interest in each of the six stories that comprise Cloud Atlas.  If memory serves (it may not), Mitchell inserts details to connect these narratives; his larger themes emerge from them gradually.  In the book, five of the stories are divided into two parts.  The sequence in which their first halves are told is reversed with the telling of the second halves; the one story told uninterruptedly is placed after five of these ten sections.   The novel also follows a chronological sequence:  the six stories are set in the 1850s, the 1930s, the 1970s, the present day, the middle of the twenty-second century, and an undefined, post-apocalyptic age.  The structure of the journey back means that Cloud Atlas ends where it began temporally.  The piece in the middle is narrated by an old man, Zachry, and is a memoir of his youth; the introduction of this self-conscious storyteller so deep into the book has the effect of underlining the storytelling skills the novelist has already demonstrated.   The film of Cloud Atlas is in important respects diametrically opposed to Mitchell’s novel.  Zachry (Tom Hanks) is the first person to appear on screen and, nearly three hours later, the last.   Whereas Mitchell takes you deep into each story in turn, the Wachowski-Tykwer narratives (they also collaborated on the screenplay) are fragmented from the start so you never settle into any one of them.  The ‘big’ themes – of eternal recurrence, the transmigration of souls etc – are explained in voiceovers at approximately one-third and again two-thirds of the way through.   (I felt at both these points that the film might as well end there and then, even though I knew from my watch it had a long way to go.)   Having stated these themes, the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer can only reiterate the philosophical points they’ve already made:  since you’ve been told what the stories as a whole signify you can be engaged only by what happens within them.  But it’s hard to care because the stories have been fractured – their narrative substance has been subordinated to narrative style and the fracturing seems to betray a lack of confidence in the art of linear storytelling.

Of course the film-makers (WWT for short) didn’t have to stick faithfully to the novel but the decisions they’ve made in adapting it are not only misconceived but surprising, given the level of commitment, and the stamina, they’ve needed to bring Cloud Atlas to the screen.  I guess they wanted to replicate an extraordinary narrative structure – but there’s nothing extraordinary about a movie travelling between times and places and the splintering of the stories is almost clichéd after the Inarritu pictures of recent years.  Kicking things off with an old man talking about the telling of tales immediately suggests this will be one of the subjects of the movie; showing a bit of each of the six stories makes immediately clear that these will have to be linked up.  In theory, having the same actor play different roles sounds like a good way of realising reincarnation but several people appear in more than one guise very soon so you get the point too quickly.  Then they appear in disguise – which is fundamentally contradictory to the persistence of a single presence.  After not very long, the main interest in Cloud Atlas is in trying to work out who’s hiding under an improbable exterior (the final credits, which reveal all, are more interesting than the ‘climaxes’ of the film itself) – and wondering who’ll get the worst wig and make-up job. (This is a keen competition but Tom Hanks, with a ginger toupee and sideburns, and Ben Whishaw in a bandeau, thick specs and various outgrowths of facial hair – both in the 1975 story – are leading contenders.)

Film is as easily capable of supernaturalising the worlds it describes as it is of moving fluidly among them.  The CGI effects here are often spectacular and beautiful but this admixture of high-tech and daft disguises – the characters getting out the dressing-up box (and often choosing drag) – is very odd.  Jim Broadbent creates clear and vivid characterisations as the appropriative, past-it composer, the vanity publisher who gets locked in an old people’s home, and the ship’s captain in the 1850 section.  Ben Whishaw doesn’t spend too long as the bandeaued music-seller in 1970s California; he’s mostly the rascally composer’s amanuensis, who actually writes the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’.  The scenes between Whishaw and Broadbent are just about the only ones in the film with a real spark, although James D’Arcy, bad in Hitchcock, is good as the amanuensis’s gay lover.  David Gyasi has great dynamism as the Moriori stowaway on the Victorian ship.  Most of the better-known members of the cast – they include, as well as Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant – are remarkably uninteresting.

There’s no denying that the novel is about enduring souls in different perishable bodies (although Mitchell has said this is meant to be ‘just a symbol really of the universality of human nature’) but WWT banalise the underlying theme.  In the book, the theme, whatever else you may think of it, is highly distinctive:  it’s presented on screen in ways that make it seem familiar from other movies.  This may be a line from the novel but, when a character in the film (Doona Bae’s twenty-second century clone) explains that, when death occurs, ‘I see it as one door closing and another door opening’, the effect isn’t even pretentious:  she sounds to have got the idea from  Maria von Trapp.   The film’s score, by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, is pretentious although there’s no arguing with the power of the sequence of chords nicked from Sibelius’s Second Symphony.  People who loathe the book may well feel the movie as a whole, and its music in particular, exposes the original for what it really is but, although I’ve mixed feelings about Mitchell’s novel, I think it’s been done a disservice by WWT.  The Odeon audience reacted to the most obvious and spectacular bits of violence and the stupidest bits of comedy but they were probably relieved to have something to react to.   At the end of the film, Zachry’s grandchildren beg him to tell them another story.  It’s one of the happier moments of the film when he declines.

24 February 2013