Cloud Atlas

Like so many films these days, released in the UK months and months after the US, it may be easy for an audience in this country to forget that Cloud Atlas was eligible for Oscars - and completely ignored by the Academy. That, along with extremely polarized reviews, will no doubt lead to this film being considered an ambitious but ultimately failed project, despite easily making back its mammoth budget and having some very prominent critics raving about it.

It most definitely split audiences, in a way that the book didn't split its readers, and while the cause of this is primarily structural and derived from expectations about how the cinema will tell stories, ultimately it boiled down to the problem that I found with Cloud Atlas and also Mitchell's Ghostwritten, but wasn't present in Number9Dream - the fact that there really isn't a nice substantial connection between these different stories, only echoes, and that isn't quite enough to satisfy. That said, the screen adaptation quite wisely steered clear of the book's tendency to play with reality by making you think that the characters in previous stories are fictional - here, at least, they are all real even if they later inspired a fictional biopic.

It's unsurprising, but the film ditches the symmetrical structure of the film to cut between the six stories repeatedly, losing linearity in favour of an overall progression, faster pace (in a very long film) and quicker start - it's not easy for readers to be confronted with several chapters of Melville pastiche, but book readers are likely to be more patient than cinemagoers. It's also quite the feast for the eyes when six different films in different styles are intercut, often very beautifully juxtaposed. Of course a lot more is lost in concession to a cinema audience - the nuances of language, references to Nietzsche and Nabokov, the shock of child rape, side-references to Mitchell's earlier books - but there is plenty gained too, from visual spectacle to a more visceral depiction of just how unpleasant Sonmi's story is.
And the main problem here is that the film is confusing, especially for non-book readers. Blockbusters are not meant to be confusing, and 'is there actually any real connection between these stories beyond birthmarks and cursory mentions of previous stories?' looms a bit too large for this to have been a success.

But as one who knew that would be the case, I enjoyed it immensely. Having the actors recur not only means they all get a stab at playing extremely against-type (Tom Hanks as thuggish Irish writer? Hugh Grant as brutal savage murderer in warpaint? Hugo Weaving not only as a mocking phantasm of the mind, an Agent Smith-type assassin and a callous slave-trader, but best of all as a very, very scary woman? Sign me up) but each of them also gets to balance their hammy minor roles with a more moving and heartfelt main part. This is a film any actor must have loved to be in, and even if some of the attempts to make someone of one race look like someone of another are a bit disastrous, the style shifts are endless fun and this can truly be said to have it all - period drama, sci-fi chase scenes with lots of explosions, savage tribes in the jungle, gentle comedy, tender love, high art, political commentary...the only slight miss-hit was not having the 70s section a bit more like the trashy pulp story it was supposed to be. The fact that the San Francisco scenes were shot in Scotland is a bit of a revelation!

I will concede that this isn't for everyone. If you worry you don't understand some greater unifying theme rather than just going 'Clearly there's no great intention to make bolder connections', you will probably get annoyed searching for it. But if you can love a film for its self-conscious artifice, you are to my mind getting this one right.