Cloud Nine

It’s weird when actors play more than one role in a movie. It takes you back to the days of Peter Sellers, who would impersonate, say, a suave RAF commander in one scene of Dr. Strangelove and a Nazi-like nuclear expert in another. But that was Peter Sellers.

The gimmick of actors taking on multiple roles draws attention to itself in Cloud Atlas, and it pulls you out of what might have been an ambitious triumph. You are left at times wondering — and worrying — if Tom Hanks is about to show up wearing a wig or do a Mrs. Doubtfire. You keep expecting to see Peter Sellers turn up, arching an eyebrow. And this is not a comedy.

Based on David Mitchell’s novel made up of six connected stories, this is the kind of marathon challenge that required multiple directors, not just an army of actors. So Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and the Wachowskis (Lana and Andy) helm six story lines that span from the 18th century to the distant future (at least there’s no caveman segment). Some have compared the time-expanding scope of Cloud Atlas to Terence Malick’s Tree of Life, but while they do share an air of pretentiousness, Malick’s movie, in comparison, is like a meditation on grass growing.

But sometimes watching grass grow can be more rewarding. The Wachowskis and Tykwer opt for an examination of human relationships and underlying human connections through death and reincarnation that crisscrosses through time like a sped-up Warner Brothers cartoon. They do this by throwing in comedy, action, romance and all the ingredients of a blockbuster. So why was Cloud Atlas pretty much ignored in its Manila run?
Could be the title, which is never adequately explored and may have baffled potential viewers. That it’s based on a “literary” work might have dissuaded some others; and its daunting length — 163 minutes — might have repelled others. Yet despite its length, Cloud Atlas is no more plodding than, say, The Hobbit.

The movie opens with an aged storyteller at a campfire (Tom Hanks) sending us into flashback mode and speaking in a weird retro-futuristic patois that takes getting used to. Hanks — along with Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Zhou Xun, Hugh Grant and Jim Sturgess — turns up in scene after scene in a different disguise, and after a while this becomes hard to take seriously, let alone keep track of. Each main actor takes on about five or six roles, so that’s about 40 to 50 characters to deal with, each one wearing distracting wigs, makeup or eye prosthetics. If reincarnation is the theme, then having each actor shift gender, race or age seems like a good visual cue that the soul is migrating across the ages; yet why would people still look essentially like their past selves? Doesn’t one shed the physical shell when the soul migrates into a new body? This is a matter best left to reincarnation experts.

The stories involve an evil doctor (Hanks again) poisoning a shipboard passenger to steal his gold in the South Pacific seas, circa 1849. Another thread concerns Ben Whishaw as a gay music transcriber whose apprenticeship with a nasty composer (Broadbent) leads him to suicide; another has investigative journalist Halle Berry investigating a nuclear power plant in 1973; another has Broadbent being locked up in a retirement home by his brother (Hugh Grant) and plotting his escape; and another is set in a futuristic society of clone-like servants (including Korean actress Xun) who finally glimpse their true fate.

This future segment reminds us a lot of both Soylent Green and the Wachowskis’ Matrix movies. Not surprising, since all of those movies were about pulling the scales from your eyes and seeing the true picture. The future, though nasty and brutish here, looks pretty visually stunning under the Wachowskis’ direction.

Another future segment involves Berry as a member of a technologically advanced society, seeking the help of tribesman Hanks to find a forbidden outpost called Cloud Atlas. There they try to uncover and send a message to mankind’s survivors who have spread out across space to escape a nuclear apocalypse. What’s weird is how Berry’s accent shifts from technologically advanced in the early scenes to post-apocalyptic patois during the course of the movie, so everything becomes “de true-true” and “de next-next,” like Jar-Jar Binks running a Berlitz school.

The other important theme in Cloud Atlas is freedom and personal responsibility. A number of main characters, at some point, utter a variation on the line “I can no longer suffer such outrageous abuse” (I’m paraphrasing here), so the underlying theme is that people must recognize their own inherent dignity and rise up against oppressors. And then risk getting reborn as a Cajun-spouting, rag-wearing tribesman in a post-apocalyptic future, apparently.

One controversy that attached itself to Cloud Atlas was the use of non-Asian actors playing Asian and ethnic roles, and vice versa. But really, in this gumbo stew of wigs and makeup, it hardly really registers that Jim Sturgess is wearing some kind of Korean eye implants, or that Zhou Xun is the oddest-looking Southern Belle in screen history; you just let this stuff wash over you.

On the Richter Scale of Overacting, Xun occupies the leftmost side, perfectly restrained and balanced while playing a future fabricant; whereas Hanks overacts in about six of his seven roles. Not surprising that some have compared his turns here to a very long SNL skit. 

Despite its laughable elements, Cloud Atlas tackles big feelings, and philosophical musings not usually found in big-star sci-fi outings. At times ridiculous, it is, at the very least, a visually stunning curio worth checking out once in this lifetime. And who knows? Maybe it will become a better movie in another lifetime.