MOVING IMAGES film reviews
Masquerade party Jonathan Richards I The New Mexican Cloud Atlas, drama, rated R, Regal Stadium 14, 2.5 chiles If you see only one movie this year, perhaps it should be Cloud Atlas. Not that it’s the best movie of the year. But it is six movies for the price of one, and it packs the running time of two more modest features. It covers about half a millennium. It is the work of three directors. It serves up some of your favorite actors in a half dozen different roles apiece, sometimes heavily disguised. So for those who are severely limited in budget, time, and inclination, this extravaganza offers the opportunity to get a year’s worth of moviegoing under your belt in one fell swoop. It has taken Cloud Atlas some eight years to make the journey from bestselling novel to the screen, and many thought it was a destination that could never be reached. The book begins in 1850 as a memoir of a seafaring expedition in the South Pacific. That narrative is interrupted mid-sentence and is succeeded by a new one that unfolds in the 1930s in a series of letters from a young composer to his lover, which after a while explain the sudden abandonment of the interrupted memoir and incorporate its story. This format continues until six different tales in six different eras — past, present, and future — have been strung together and interwoven. The novel then doubles back to pick up the unfinished narratives and bring them to term. If that sounds confusing, imagine trying to make a movie of it. The novel “always struck me as unfilmable,” author David Mitchell wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “which is why I believed that Cloud
Kiss and makeup: Tom Hanks and Halle Berry
Atlas would never be made into a movie. I was half right.” The version that reached the screen, which Mitchell described as “a sort of pointillist mosaic,” mostly eschews the bouts of sustained narrative that the novel offers and instead shakes the stories up like dice in a cup and tosses them out in short bursts, creating a bravura opportunity for editor Alexander Berner, who should have collected hazardous-duty pay. Sometimes the threads of a storyline stretch out over minutes. Sometimes they are reduced to tantalizing seconds, just long enough to make an impression before skipping into another, and it is to Berner’s credit that much of the time viewers actually have some idea where they are. The other department that gets a heavy workout is makeup. No fewer than 24 names are listed in that section of the credits, under the supervision of Heike Merker. With each principal actor and many secondary cast members playing multiple parts, the makeup artists must have been as busy as fact-checkers in a presidential campaign. Each actor has one role in which he or she more or less looks familiar. But then they show up again and again, crossing lines of race and gender, in wigs, prosthetics, greasepaint, whiteface, and sagging crepe skin in
Disguised in this picture are three Hollywood stars. Can you spot them?
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October 26 - November 1, 2012
guises that are sometimes obvious and sometimes impenetrable. James D’Arcy as Old Rufus Sixsmith is pretty clearly Young Rufus Sixsmith in old-age drag, and stars like Susan Sarandon are usually easy to spot. But you might not unravel some of the transformations until the closing credits. So some of the fun of the movie is the guessing game: “Hey — isn’t that Tom Hanks?” It’s an amusing brain teaser, along the lines of the 1963 John Huston romp The List of Adrian Messenger, in which Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and others buried their identities under layers of disguise until the final unmasking. This game is a distraction from the stories being told, but it gives the actors a chance to really cut loose. Hugh Grant appears as one Hugh Grant-like character, but the rest of the time his familiar mannerisms are gone as he rollicks through guises that are sometimes a real challenge to penetrate. The same goes for Oscar winners like Hanks, Halle Berry, and Jim Broadbent. The directors are Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and the Wachowski siblings (of the Matrix series), the creative team formerly known as the Wachowski brothers until Larry made a gender switch to become Lana, an experience that may have given her special insight into the challenges of the transformations required of the actors in this movie. Tykwer handles the three more or less contemporary sections: the tale of the 1930s composer, a 1970s whistleblower thriller involving a reporter and a nefarious nuclear scheme, and a plot that casts Broadbent as a slightly dotty publisher entrapped by his brother into an old-age home. The Wachowskis take on the futuristic material — Neo Seoul in 2144 and a postapocalyptic world of hunter-gatherers and vicious predators — as well as a 19th-century slave-trade tale of villainy and redemption. Cloud Atlas runs on longer than it should, and its platitudes and dialogue will sometimes tax your patience (“I have an uncle who is a scientist — but he also believes in love”), but there’s no denying its entertainment value and its technical accomplishment. It’s fun to watch the stories link together, the actors take on their chameleonic assignments with gusto, and the world go to hell in a handbasket. ◀