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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Cloud Atlas Review: You Tried

WordMaster





                Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece – not the movie, but the award-winning novel by celebrated British author David Mitchell. Published in 2004 to sensational reviews, the story sprawls across countries and generations, starting in 1850s New Zealand and ultimately ending up in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, as well as genres; we get everything from a pulpy conspiracy thriller to a farcical comedy to a dystopian science-fiction coming-of-age tale, all seamlessly woven together through the subtly connected characters and Mitchell’s elegant, versatile prose. If ever a truly unfilmable book existed, this might be it.

                I’m still not sure whether this attempt by the Wachowskis (the duo behind the revolutionary sci-fi action flick The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer (director of the German-language Run Lola Run and the Clive Owen-starring The International) to bring Mitchell’s vision to life is more daring or reckless. Certainly, in a time when the movie industry seems less focused on quality than quantity and even independent film-makers adhere too closely to predetermined clichés and norms, any project of this scope and ambition deserves resounding praise for its efforts alone. Regardless of how the end product turned out, whether it was an awe-inspiring tour de force or an awe-inspiring catastrophe, people were going to talk about it, which is more than I can say for the majority of movies that flit into theaters nowadays.



                Unfortunately, at least in the opinion of this writer (I know there are many people, including critics, who feel differently), Cloud Atlas falls into the latter category. Long story short, it’s something of a mess, devoid of any real sense of direction. Aside from the touching, if occasionally overdramatic and manipulative score and the grand cinematography, the movie doesn’t succeed on any tangible level. Even in the grand scheme of botched book adaptations, it’s pretty disappointing.

                On the most fundamental level, Cloud Atlas fails because, despite its mind-bending concept, it’s not particularly engaging. Given the epic nature of the plot, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the fact that the movie spans nearly three hours; anything less would surely be inadequate. So the problem lies not with the running time itself but with how the directors choose to spend that time. While I concede that the innovative, nested-egg structure of Mitchell’s novel probably wouldn’t work on screen, I doubt the result would be any worse than what the film-makers actually did, which is to leap back and forth between the six separate stories as often as possible with only the most tenuous rhyme or reason. This creates a jarring sense of whiplash that is enhanced tenfold by the arbitrary editing, which seems to sever every single tension-filled moment without fail, flinging the unsuspecting audience into an entirely different time period and country and interrupting what little flow the meandering plot has. The movie spends so little time with each individual story that even as someone who adored the book, I found it impossible to develop even a tentative emotional connection with the characters, who felt so vivid and alive on page. By the end of the second hour, I was fighting the urge to glance at my watch, wishing that this seemingly endless movie could, well, end so I could unleash my long-suppressed complaints onto the world. Whereas the book had the “what does this all mean?” hook, among other things, to keep me engrossed and pull me through the slower parts, the movie just drags on… and on…

                Then, there’s the issue of the casting, which is what prevented me from being teenage-girl-on-prom-night-excited about the movie in the first place. Surprisingly, aside from Halle Berry, whose delivery of the line “I know this song. I know I know it” (as featured in the trailer) still makes me cringe, I didn’t absolutely despise any of the actors, though I maintain that the majority of them are woefully miscast. On the flip side, I wasn’t exactly impressed by the acting either. Even the best performances, given by Ben Wishaw as the secretly virtuoso (and, as the film made sure to point out, gay) composer Robert Frobisher and Doona Bae as submissive clone-turned-revolutionary leader Sonmi-451, are merely okay. For all the hype about the actors playing multiple roles, none of them are given the opportunity to truly shine, a result of both their limited screen time and the fact that a considerable amount of the dialogue is conveyed through not-particularly-insightful voiceovers. Then there’s the matter of the now-controversial race-swapping gimmick, which had very British actors like Jim Sturgess and Hugh Grant pretending to be Korean. This subject is more fitting for a blog post than a review, so I won’t go too in-depth, but suffice it to say that this stunt is both mildly offensive and highly ineffective. When your audience spends more time trying to guess who is who than paying attention to the story, you know you are doing something wrong. Plus, for the most part, the make-up is borderline terrible, especially for the Asian characters (aka the white actors playing Asian characters), who look more Vulcan than human.

                This last section is reserved for nitpicks – and trust me, I have many nits to pick. I don’t want to sound like a purist because I  will always defend a filmmaker’s right to diverge from the source material if it proves beneficial, but many of the alterations made in Cloud Atlas are either baffling or downright sacrilegious (albeit, in some cases, sadly predictable). Most glaring is the ending of the Sonmi-451 story, which embodies everything that is wrong with Hollywood (Cloud Atlas is technically an independent film, but with its $100 million+ budget, it’s essentially a blockbuster). What should have been a tragically clever subversion of dystopian conventions instead becomes an utterly generic tale of romance and martyrdom about as thoughtful as Transformers. Not to mention the fact that the explosion-filled action sequences that, for some reason, comprise a good deal of the storyline are painfully chaotic and dull. In the end, if the Wachowskis and Tykwer cared deeply about Cloud Atlas, either the book or the movie, it doesn’t show. For such a risky endeavor, the film feels oddly passionless, workmanlike even. No matter how drastically you modify the source material’s plot, even if you, say, decide to change an entire plotline so it fits with your ersatz theme that was absolutely not the point of the book, it’s excusable as long as you 1) stay true to the spirit of the original and 2) breathe new life into your adaptation. Cloud Atlas does neither. It’s all surface and no depth, from the blatant preoccupation with dazzling visuals at the expense of character development to the too-on-the-nose monologues about how EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED, in case you didn’t get that from the posters and trailers and the fact that all movies with interlocking stories are about connection.

                Is Cloud Atlas really unfilmable? I’m usually inclined to believe that some director, somewhere, sometime, exists who is ingenious enough to tackle even the most complicated, abstract material (I still can’t help but wonder whether Christopher Nolan could have pulled off the Russian doll structure considering how he crafted the similarly nonlinear Memento with such finesse). But the truth is, it isn’t the structure alone that makes Cloud Atlas hard to film nor is it the switches between genres and tones, though all of those are definitely factors. Among the myriad themes subtly interwoven into the fabric of the narrative is a tribute to the power of storytelling and its ability to, as Time Out New York said in their review of the novel, shape our sense of history, civilization, and selfhood. Cloud Atlas (the book) succeeds not because of its puzzle-like framework or breathtaking scale or even its compassionately drawn characters but because of Mitchell’s writing. As the novel skips through time, space and souls, the one constant that remains is the author’s masterful use of language, his ability to guide readers through this mysterious yet recognizable world with nothing but words. A movie may be able to convey the basic idea behind Cloud Atlas, but the story fits right at home within the intimacy, the freedom, of paper. We may change and grow old and fade away, but our words are immortal.










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