Cloud Atlas

Life is like a box of celestial confluences

Grade: B

Directors: Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski

Starring: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, James D’Arcy, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 52 min.

The overarching irony to D.W. Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece Intolerance, a colossus comprising four stories spanning 2,500 years meant to illuminate mankind’s unceasing penchant for injustice, is that was made partly as a response to groups who (rightly) attacked Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as bigoted and extolling the Ku Klux Klan. While the motives behind Intolerance’s creation are dubious, there’s no debating its scope and influence.

Few films since have sought to so directly duplicate Intolerance as Cloud Atlas. Simultaneously engrossing and infuriating, this spiraling adaption of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel spans six interwoven storylines, beginning with a Pacific Ocean voyage in 1849 and ending hundreds of years hence. In between, there tales about a young amanuenis and Cambridge outcast (Ben Whishaw) struggling to survive as a gay man in 1930s Europe, an investigative journalist (Halle Berry) fighting to uncover the dangerous ties between nuclear power and oil companies in the 1970s, and a mini-revolt led by a genetically-engineered clone named Somni-451 (Doona Bae) in totalitarian Neo Seoul, circa 2144, where fabricants are used as slave labor (and sometimes worse).

The puzzle-piece plots are both thematically and narratively connected. The main character in each timeline discovers the tale of the preceding one via evolving modes of storytelling, from diaries and letters to a book manuscript, a movie and a holographic recording device. The final plot thread, set in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, is shared a millennia away by an old man (Tom Hanks) to a group of children gathered around a simple campfire. The common refrain to each story is the corrupt, oppressive nature of mankind and its propensity to subjugate others for the sake of selfish gain.

In a film full of cannibals, slavery and futuristic floating cars, the most wacky story might be a modern-day parable labeled “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” There, the titular book publisher (Jim Broadbent) goes from being unexpectedly flush with cash to fleeing a group of gangsters to being involuntarily confined to an old folks home reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, down to a Nurse Ratched variant played by Hugo Weaving.

If it sounds like Cloud Atlas is all over the place, well, it is. The initial flow of the film evokes the early establishing scenes in Magnolia—both movies also share an alternating blend of gonzo humor and deadly drama. Much of the cast—including all the leads—play multiples roles spanning each episode that sometimes cross gender and racial lines (the closing credits match actors with their parts, including several surprising reveals). While it’s uneasy to watch white actors in epicanthic yellowface (or Berry as a white trophy wife in one chapter), the device does further (and, indeed, often shoulders) the film’s notion of our collective continuity through time. I’m still waiting to hear exactly why that notion is important, though.

Any film conceived by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, and little since) and Andy and Lana (née Larry) Wachowski (The Matrix, and little since) is going to be spectacle first, not that there’s anything wrong with that in a movie lasting nearly three hours. But the film is also as bloated as the number of directors employed to make it, traversing not only time and space but also movie genres. Ironically, the filmmakers foist contrasting methods to force-feed a story about connectivity. Moreover, it is telling that only half of the six storylines would make compelling standalones.

As a fantasy hodgepodge, Cloud Atlas as a whole is far greater than the sum of its disparate parts. Still, breadth—no matter how impressive—does not necessarily equate depth.

The Lovely Bones

Wait, you're not a vampire, are you?

Grade: B –

Director: Peter Jackson

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, and Rose McIver

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

It’s not the story about the rape and murder of a teenage girl that makes reviewing The Lovely Bones such a thorny undertaking.

If anything seemed like a sure thing, it was the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s mega-bestseller – it remained on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for over a year – directed by Oscar-winner Peter Jackson, helmsman of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, and apropos of Sebold’s dark subject, Heavenly Creatures.

Instead, apart from Stanley Tucci’s acclaimed turn as serial killer George Harvey, The Lovely Bones has been shut out of the awards season accolades. Frankly, some of the catcalls are nitpicky and unjustified. One of the most repeated criticisms is Jackson’s decision not to shoot the book’s gruesome, emotional touchstone, in which Harvey rapes and dismembers 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, Oscar-nominated for Atonement). Jackson proclaimed such a scene would “make it a film that I wouldn’t want to watch” and that he had “no interest” in filming “anything that depicted violence towards…a young person in a way that was serious…”

Jackson’s larger, more cogent point is that the lurid rendering of such a heinous act is so combustible that it would suck the narrative and emotional oxygen out of the rest of the film. Indeed, The Lovely Bones is principally the story of Susie’s journey to an afterlife called “the in-between,” where she looks down on not only her killer, but also her family and friends as they struggle to cope with her death.

Jackson’s CGI-laden rendering of Susie’s hereafter is both risky and problematic. His ceaseless psychedelic representations are seemingly lifted from Terry Gilliam’s cutting room floor. But, the tableau is occasionally bucolic and evocatively spiritual. When Jack (Mark Wahlberg), Susie’s grieving father, smashes the collection of ships-in-a-bottle he and his deceased daughter once constructed together, the juxtaposition of life-sized shipwrecks that simultaneously occur along a rocky coastline in Susie’s afterlife is an affecting blend of bombast and melancholy.

The real problem with The Lovely Bones is that Jackson seems caught in his own in-between world. For starters, he adopts the book’s early-1970s suburbia setting, a milieu that speaks more to Sebold’s age (born in 1963) than any meaningful approximation of “more innocent times.” More significantly, Jackson takes the book’s already cumbersome plot points and lacquers them with jolting narrative and tonal shifts. The story’s meditative core metastasizes into a psychological thriller, police procedural, revenge saga, love story, coming-of-age tale, dark comedy, family drama, and, yes, spiritual odyssey. Taken individually, some of these subplots work well. As a whole, the result is schizophrenic and strangely emotionless.

Wahlberg proves both too young and lacking in emotional depth to portray the tormented Jack. Carolyn Dando and Reece Ritchie seemingly trained at the Twilight acting academy to play, respectively, the clairvoyant Ruth Conners and Susie’s would-be heartthrob, Ray. The rest of the otherwise game cast is repeatedly squandered: Susan Sarandon’s role as boozy Grandma Lynn is played for incongruous comic relief; the part of Abigail (Rachel Weisz), Susie’s mom, is edited down to the point of inertia; Lindsey (Rose McIver), Susie’s sister, primarily plays Nancy Drew and jogs around her neighborhood…a lot.

Even the precocious Ronan is reduced to monotonous narration and gaping at green screens. Her talents, like the other moments of brilliance sprinkled throughout The Lovely Bones, suffocate under the weight of great expectations and muddled implementations.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com