It’s possible, if daunting, to imagine a brilliant movie that could be conjured out of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel
Cloud Atlas—a film that would play with the language of cinema the way Mitchell’s nimble, tricksy book plays with the English language.
* It would have to be an adaptation that opened up like an accordion to contain six separate mini-movies: a
Master and Commander-style shipboard adventure, a love story set in pre-WWII England, a ’70s paranoid thriller, a farcical jailbreak picture, and not one but two sci-fi films set in separate dystopic futures. And such a film would have to leap among all these separate storylines, each with its own distinct voice and style, while elaborating like a symphony on the work’s larger theme—which, without spoiling, I can say has to do with the eternal recurrence of souls through time, and the lasting karmic echo of both good and evil deeds.
Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of
Cloud Atlas is emphatically not that movie. Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there’s something commendable about the directors’ commitment to their grandiose act of folly. This movie is, for the most part, execrable, but a part of me enjoyed it—I never, for example, begrudged it its running time, which at 2 hours and 50 minutes is saying something.
