Doona Bae plays a rebellious clone in Cloud Atlas’ most compelling subplot.
Optimism flickers, falters and threatens to die but ultimately finds its balance in Cloud Atlas like a twinkling street lamp on a foggy night. The six intertwining parables that make up the film (based on the David Mitchell novel) are tinged with dread from the start. By the time the yarn has been spun, however, hope pervades.
Destiny, we learn at first, is shaped by those who have come before us. People die but souls survive from lifetime to lifetime. Bodies are nothing more than vehicles for these souls, rendering death a mundane concept.
Yet despite the endless claptrap about fate, we can apparently make our own judgments to better the future incarnations of our souls: a rather strange and thankless plight that feels oddly out of sync with the film’s idealistic tint.
To portray this idealism, directors Lana and Andy Wachowski (Speed Racer) and Tom Tykwer (Three) douse their work in saccharine sentimentality. But human virtue, as a stand-alone theme to buoy such a mammoth epic of a film, is a pin-thin reason for making grandiose decisions that span the sands of time.
Also, the individual stories are barely cohesive from a tonal standpoint. The worst plot line is Timothy Cavendish’s (Jim Broadbent, The Iron Lady), which centers on the embattled former publisher’s attempt to escape from a nursing home. Most of these sequences are comical and bubbly, which doesn’t mesh well with the existentialist hue of the overall film. Perhaps this story would be more satisfying as a separate work; as a major component of the narrative knot, however, it proves counterproductive.
Other plot lines, especially the post-apocalyptic scenario with Tom Hanks (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) as a tribesman and Halle Berry (Dark Tide) as a futuristic visitor, are laughably self-serious, punctuated by ridiculously archaic dialogue that’s barely comprehensible.
Only two of the stories unfurl in a riveting fashion, due to their liberation from the distracting pompousness of the other narratives. One of these involves journalist Luisa Rey (also Halle Berry) and her investigation of a nuclear power plant that has put the public at risk. These scenes, which take place in 1973 San Francisco, are deliciously orchestrated in the same vein as a slinky caper film. Berry is phenomenal as the archetypal heroine, running up and down the San Francisco hills like a true action star.
The other winning narrative is set in a dystopian, Blade Runner-esque society — Neo-Seoul in 2184. We learn that Sonmi-451 (the breathtaking Doona Bae, As One) is one of many clones programmed to work as servers at a fast-food restaurant. But Sonmi rebels against the established order and thrusts herself into a realm of real human emotions and thoughts despite her prior servitude. These sequences, which portray Sonmi’s transition from slave to latent revolutionary to irreplaceable philosophizer, are graceful and patient, setting her slow growth against the cold, calculated robotism of Neo-Seoul’s bustling metropolis.
On the whole, Cloud Atlas deserves the most credit for its thematic clarity. It dares to invoke some of the same ideas as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, specifically the concept that our previous lives shape our present lives, but in a manner that is — surprisingly — more concise.
If one were to suggest that Anderson’s film keeps its themes suppressed and shrouded in mounds of aesthetic gloss, then the opposite could be said about Cloud Atlas. The plot is an unruly mess, yet it delivers a clear and powerful message.
We may be exhausted, slogging through an almost-painful 164 minutes of existentialist rambling, but the optimism at the heart of this messy movie is infectious enough to (almost) make it worth the trip.
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