One sure way to attract the agreement of the gorgeous blonde in the bar is to tell her she reads as “spiritual.” Or she “seems like a writer.” Or (if all else fails), she’s “complicated.” “Cloud Atlas” is that beautiful girl, but it isn’t as complicated as it thinks.
Cutting back and forth across eras while telling parallel stories about battling oppression using a core group of actors reincarnated as different characters, “Cloud Atlas” tells us that since Halle Berry helps out Tom Hanks when he is a mud-eating peasant in a post-apocalyptic 24th-century Iron Age (“Game of Thrones” shtick), he’ll do her a solid in San Francisco in 1973 (the “Silkwood” segment) when she’s a crusading reporter and he’s a nuclear scientist.
Other stories recall E.M. Forster (1936 Cambridge, where a young gay schemer played by Ben Whishaw provides crucial assistance to an aging composer played by Jim Broadbent), “Blade Runner” (23rd-century Seoul, where a clone-waitress played by Doona Bae tries to break free of her evil corporate masters with the help of a dashing young freedom fighter played by Jim Sturgess), “Amistad” (on the high seas of 1849, a slave played by David Gyasi educates Sturgess’ young attorney on the evils of plantation life) and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (Broadbent and pals scheme to escape from a Nurse Ratched-like figure, played by Hugo Weaving, holding them prisoner at an old-folks home in 2012). As for that gauzy, goofy look at advanced life forms of the 24th century, it reminded me of the Olympus toga party in the 1981 “Clash of the Titans.” Or maybe “Xanadu.”
Listening to the barroom blonde discourse on her complexity is advisable only within easy reach of a bottle or tap, but owing to a lapse in judgment I saw “Cloud Atlas” stone-cold sober. Amid all the jabber about how we keep repeating the same stories because we’re all interconnected particles in the same gelatinous nondenominational faith blob, I felt like I was stuck in a mid-’70s “let me rap with you for a minute” interfaith discussion led by the kind of beardy guitar-strumming pacifist whose bell-bottoms you want to staple together. Do I feel deeply interconnected with my fellow souls from up and down the centuries and across the universe? No, I can barely relate to people from California.
It’s not hard to see the personal appeal of this goop about shape-shifting and transcendence to the former Larry Wachowski, who in recent years transformed himself into a woman named Lana and directed this film along with her brother Andy and the German Tom Tykwer. But the alleged big ideas are sophomoric clichés. Based on a literary novel by David Mitchell, the movie has the intellectual heft of daytime television.
I’ll grant that the film has many layers. All of them are terrible. At the superficial level: Hanks and Hugh Grant (and Sturgess and Susan Sarandon) lack range. Grant as a barbarian warlord with Mike Tyson face tattoos? I think not. Hanks as a wily Victorian mariner or a raging Irish novelist with a Fu Manchu? No, and no. Raiding the backstage trunk for funny noses, big teeth and wacky wigs doesn’t help, and there are excellent reasons why Caucasians don’t normally try to pass for Asians and vice versa.
The middle layer hopes to work as effects-laden entertainment, but the directors can’t make any of their half-dozen chase scenes engaging, and they all end in the dreariest way (good guy defenseless, bad guy cocks weapon while issuing one final one-liner and . . . boom, too late, someone sneaks up behind and ends the villain with a shovel or a laser blaster). Repeated motifs like falling off bridges add nothing, and the movie’s idea of a big “reveal” is telegraphed so far in advance that you can’t believe the filmmakers are actually going to bluster on through with the obvious. When they do, you’ll shake your head and say, “Yeah, I’ve seen ‘Soylent Green,’ too.”