Cloud Atlas (2012)

“Cloud Atlas” is 2012’s Must See’s Big Screen Glory. That few people will ever see. I say this not for the greatness or splendor of this wunderkind time-hoping epic of faith, art, love, souls, and reincarnation, but because “Atlas” is also a train wreck of all those things, careening out of control like nothing before it. That in itself is glorious.

Written and directed by the Wachowskis -– Andy and Lana (formerly Larry), who gave us “The Matrix” and also its diminishing sequels –- and Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run”), “Cloud” is an endlessly fascinating and just as perplexing tale of time. My gut reaction falters and dodges, swooning from absolute devotion to flippant disregard. Joyous, no? Is this not what the best of art does? This is a film to watch again and again, ranking among “Gangs of New York” and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” flawed modern masterpieces.

Based on the celebrated 2004 novel by David Mitchell –- which I have yet to read -– “Cloud” follows six interconnected stories across roughly 500 years: A privileged and gravely ill lawyer on a Pacific Ocean voyage in 1849 who is awakened to the horrors of slavery, a pre-war 1930s London as a young and deeply troubled gay composer lands a dream-job-turned-nightmare under a retired and senile musical maestro, then onto 1970s San Francisco as an African-American reporter investigates dirty dealings at a nuclear plant.

Deep breath. We’re only halfway through.

In modern England, 2012, a nerdy book editor runs afoul of a gangster and his own twisted, vengeful brother. In 2144, Seoul, South Korea, a very “Blade Runner”-like replicant-type waitress makes a break for freedom and realizes her human masters are most inhumane, with our final story in the 24^th century where much of the world rests obliterated under the oceans, and the last few humans live as primitives, except those who escaped Earth for distant worlds. This last story spans decades out, book-ending the film as a narration.

In the book, the stories follow chronologically, unbroken. In the film, they have been broken and scattered about, chunks and tidbits each flowing into the next and back. The movement is seamless, never off-putting, as smart and careful edits allow us to flow from the rush of a man or a horse, into the rush of a car or train. A birthmark is marks a reincarnated soul coming back tine and again to get it right. The lover of the ’30s composer turns up as an elderly and doomed man in the ’70s nuclear plant investigation. 

If anything, “Atlas” isn’t about reincarnated souls trying to get their own souls right in a lifetime, but get society as  whole right. The efforts, of course, as they must, lead to murder, accidents, and suicide. It also, of course, is how all people are connected, each influencing and setting a path for another. Trite? Maybe. But we need this film now, I do. There is no Tardis, btw.

Here, also, is where Wachowskis and Tykwer truly shine as they show how art influences our lives, not just misery and failed salvation, and allows us to live on for infinity via our creative mind. The lawyer’s life journal is published in a book to be read by the gay youth whose music the reporter obsesses with whose own novels will one day flow into another story. The film “Soylent Green” briefly appears in the background of one chapter, and comes up horrifically ugly later. In the Korean scene, a movie adaptation of the book editor’s life plays and power drives the plot forward. The film thread is a fabric with a sense that the world of 2350 overlaps into 1850. (Note: Nearly all of the main players are creative artists, not, say, a sad plumber whose name will be lay forgotten.)

Also connecting these stories is the cast, a hefty lift itself: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Susan Sarandon, James D’Arcy, and Hugo Weaving. Almost all of the actors appear in every chapter, a stunt ingenious and yet a sharp double-edged sword as it turns too comedic, and one of the reason why the film derails and crashes, only to rise again.

Hanks plays a doctor in 1850, a hotelier in 1930s England, a nuclear engineer in the 1970s story, the gangster with a vendetta against the book editor in the 2012 chapter, an actor on TV playing the book editor (previously played by Broadbent) in the Korean segment, and a simple farmer in the last chapter. Throughout Hanks wears heavy makeup, as do all the actors in every nearly scene, and as with the makeup, which ranges from deft and extraordinary to purely off-putting and uncomfortably laughable, the acting soars and dives. This is a movie of many parts, all moving at different speeds in different orbits.

As the scientist, Hanks is soulful and romantic, heroic and stalwart, and he’s grand. As the gangster, he crashes bad with the worst comedic “SNL” guest skit he’s never done, seemingly parodying Bob Hoskins’ bloody killer in “Long Good Friday.” How far the crash? When Hanks as the mobster kills a man, the audience laughed. I groaned. That’s not the reaction I imagine the directing team was going for. If it was, they clearly misaimed.

The makeup and alternating actors ensemble also interrupts the film’s flow as I could not help but play I Spy while watching the drama unfold. Oh, look Weaving as an assassin, then a (I kid you not) leprechaun, as a slave-owner dandy, as a bulbous female nurse straight out of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and -– here’s where the makeup borderlines on but never crosses the line of offensive –- a Korean autocrat. Weaving looks ridiculous, like a melted candle, in Asian-like latex, and it distracts. The viewer, me, is no longer watching characters in a startling, long, multi-layered epic, but a series of coming and going actors playing for Oscar or ham.

Berry is at her best donning a slight wig as the journo out for a scoop, but terribly awkward -– she looks pained and terribly self-aware –- as a WASP Brit in the 1930s segment. Hanks playing an old version of the farmer, looks like the makeup truck came by and shat on his face. Sometimes, more so than not, less is more. It is true here.

Berry and Hanks, in that latter segment, also speak a gibberish English that takes time to dip into. It’s alternately inspiring -– of course language would evolve or devolve dependent on the winds of culture, but it also has the slight whiff that they are doing a dead serious impersonation of Jar Jar Binks in the film that shall not be named. You know the one. Indeed, writing this, I realize how much of the acting is mere mimicry. And, yet, I wonder if that’s part of the tale, life imitating art and art imitating life. Art as life eternal. As circular as the movie’s story.

But that does not take away from the absolute passion on screen here. Every scene, every segment and sidestep, and inside joke (the music score we hear as part of the soundtrack is vital inside the story of the film, and yet is declared lost and unimportant by some characters) needs to be here. It’s fully apparent: Tykwer -– who composed the unforgettable music, FYI — and the Wachowskis had to make this movie, or they would burst. 

It’s as exhilarating and breathlessly paced in sections as “Matrix” and “Lola,” and bloody as a grim historical film a la “The Mission” with mass slaughter in the future, where Grant -– in his best turn in years -– plays a wordless tribal chief who has gone full-on cannibal. The scenes in Korea –- directed by the Wachowskis -– may be my favorite as they pulse and vibe like a rocket ship, filled with spectacular effects and action, and a romance that recalls “Star Wars” and “Blade Runner,” mixed with a Terry Gilliam hallucination of futuristic life. The book editor comedy with Hanks as Hoskins, not so much. Car mishaps anyone?

Financed out of Germany with little Hollywood involvement, “Atlas” also recalls the gone-glory days of Tinsel-Town spectacles with larger-than-life drama and action (“Ben Hur” and “Lawrence of Arabia,”) and massive power-cast epics (“The Longest Day”) before every big film became about superheroes and boy wizards. These directors are hitting for the stands, they are not fooling around or scraping by bored with a summer spectacle.

Along with “Lifeof Pi” -– another big screen wonder of immense beauty that falls short in the end -– “Atlas” also touches on the existence of God Himself. Nowadays, a rare occasion itself. Not mockingly or with dead-eyed Pat Robertson cult adoration, but mystery, who is He? What does He want?

And that may be the great question of the film: What did I just watch? It’s a mystery I hope to unravel with future viewings, the secret thrill: I may hate or love this film next depndent on how I feel that day. The very prurpose of art, no? Temporary grade: B