Cloud Atlas

There are a lot of people out there who are going to love Cloud Atlas. Reversely, there are a lot of people out there who are going to hate Cloud Atlas. Me? I sat in the theater intrigued, enthralled and more than a little impressed that such box office heavyweights – including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant – and major Hollywood studio would throw their weight behind such an ambitious project with relatively little chance of return on investment.

Cloud Atlas spans no less than six stories that take place in the past, recent past, present, future, and far future. Several of the actors play multiple parts in all six storylines, which builds on and sells the film’s themes of life, truth, and the inter-connectivity of all people across the barriers of time and space. It’s a classic science fiction story of big ideas, and that’s in spite of the fact that several of the stories don’t even have what would conventionally be considered science fiction elements.

In the 1830s, a young lawyer tries to help a stowaway slave on a boat ride to San Francisco as the ship’s doctor tries to poison him. In 1930s Scotland, a young gay man leaves his lover and becomes apprentice to an aging composer. Forty years later, an ambitious reporter falls into a story of deadly, corporate corruption. In present day London, a book publisher becomes a victim of circumstance as he goes from having a best selling novel to ending up forcible indentured in a nursing home. In the early 22nd century, service industry workers are slave labor to a society of consumers, until one woman becomes a symbol for equality. And in the very far future, 100 years “after the fall,” a scientist seeks the means to contact Earth’s off-world colonies with the help of a simple, almost prehistoric like people.

Aside from the actors, directors Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski weave light threads between each of the various stories. But what’s especially impressive is that they don’t dumb anything down. The film opens with a Hanks’ character from the far future story, sitting in front of a fire delivering a soliloquy, like the beginning of a Shakespeare play. We then get introductory glimpses into each of the other stories, they go by in a flash and as you struggle to keep up you’re getting a sense of the larger work at play. Fortunately, the directors take it easy on us and throttle back to to ease us into the story on each level. Where it goes from there is up to you, the viewer, I think.

The problem with Cloud Atlas is that people’s whose taste rarely tread beyond the typical Hollywood hogwash are going to be blown away with just how deep this movie is. I remember when Inception came out in the summer of 2010 and hearing people talk about how complex it was, and how one almost had to bring a notepad into the cinema with them to keep everything straight. When I saw Inception a couple of weeks later, this proverbial Rubix cube of a maze of a Chinese finger trap of a film never materialized. Sure, it was complex, but I didn’t need a program to keep it all straight.

Another apt comparison might be Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, an art house hit and Academy Award nominee that many felt was given a free pass to deep thematic appreciation because no one wanted to admit that the didn’t get lest they were perceived by the rest of the audience as being stupid. Some of that comes into play in Cloud Atlas, but Tykwer and the Wachowskis are speaking with a clear voice. Granted, they’re reaching back to deal with some of the same stuff they dealt with in the first Matrix, but unlike, say, Speed Racer, it seems like they have something to say again with this film.

And some of it works better than others, and sometimes it seems certain stories are put on pause for too long as attention is drawn to other areas. The chapter that takes place at sea in 1839 was surprisingly lifeless most of the time, but Jim Broadbent as the publisher that ends up trapped in the nursing home with a Nurse Ratched tormentor played by Hugo Weaving had some great highlights and some very funny scenes. There are some rather derivative beats in the 193os music plot and the 1970s business corruption story, but the performances make it work. For style points though it goes to the 22nd century adventure in Neo- Seoul, which realizes better than any other live-action film the vibe and aesthetic of Japanese anime classics like Akira and Ghosts in the Machine.

In the end, Cloud Atlas maybe a case of the parts on their own being greater than the sum. One watches the film transfixed, which is a marvel at the nearly three hour running time. Established Hollywood filmmakers like the Wachowskis are rarely this brazen, or this bold, and I feel that if nothing else, Cloud Atlas should be saluted in those terms. It’s challenging in all the good ways a film should be challenging, but its far from perfect, and in the conflict between those two facts lies the lightening rod that fans will be discussing this film around now and into the future.

On a final note, you may remember the release of Prometheus early this year was the film that was supposed to save big budget science fiction filmmaking, and you may remember how well that turned out. More to the point, I would say that Cloud Atlas fills that order. It suffers from the same problem of thinking itself more ambitious than it actually is, but in terms of audacity and scale, then Cloud Atlas definitely trumps Prometheus. But perhaps that will be the debate of 2012, which movie speaks to the future more…

Angels & Demons

Rating: ***

To begin with, I will say that Angels & Demons is better than The Da Vinci Code, both on the page and on the screen. Some of the things that made Da Vinci such a grind as a film are addressed in Angels, which was actually written before Da Vinci, but for the film treated as a sequel. Actually, that part works rather well too, there’s something about the Catholic Church coming to Professor Robert Langdon for help following the events of Da Vinci that adds another level of dramatic tension. It’s too bad that the filmmakers don’t know how to really capitalize on that though.

Tom Hanks returns as Langdon, and problems number one and two immediately rear their heads. First, despite improvements, Langdon’s still an incredibly passive hero to build a story on. He’s often times so divorced from the action, that it’s a wonder that he’s needed there at all for the story to proceed. In book form, where you can follow Langdon’s inner monologue word for word, the character’s much more engaging, but on film he always kind of seems like a Bill Bixby David Banner that’s more concerned about Hulking out than helping. Secondly, Hanks is an incredible charismatic guy, but for some reason, as Langdon, he’s as dull as a rusty knife.

The mystery in Angels concerns the Illuminati, a radicalized sect of scientists and thinkers that want revenge against the Catholic Church for forcing them underground and literally branding their leadership with Christian dogma. Of course, all this happened hundreds of years ago, but everyone involved treats it with the immediacy of an al Qaeda bomb threat. It’s a multi-pronged attack with the four chief candidates for the next Pope being murdered, one an hour, leading up to the midnight destruction of the Vatican caused by some stolen anti-matter. Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer plays Vittoria Vetra, one of the scientists that created the anti-matter and Langdon’s sexy sidekick for this adventure.

So the stakes are much higher in this one, which is a good thing. The proverbial “ticking time clock” gives the plot heft and drives the action at an excellent pace, or at least fast enough to keep you from getting drowsy from all the esoteric knowledge of Illuminati lore being thrown at you. Church politics and kooky conspiracy theories take their place in the backseat, and we’re fortunately spared a lot of unnecessarily lengthy scenes where the history is explained in excruciating detail. Also, turning Angels into a sequel to Da Vinci adds that new layer where in the Church ends up the victim in the movie rather than being played the victim. As to why the Church is supposedly in a huff about this movie, I’m not sure.

But these kinds of improvements come at the expense of interesting characters and a story where in the main character really has no personal stake in the goings on. There’s no Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing to liven the affair and the chief villain, a nameless assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), is no where near as interesting a cold blooded killer as the albino monk Silas played by Paul Bettany, and there wasn’t really anything of interest with that character either in spite of his albinism. But what else is new? It starts from the top down, and Langdon’s so disengaged from the action that the entire climax almost happens without him. Imagine the opening of the Ark scene at the end of Raiders, and Indiana Jones isn’t there because he never got on the sub to secret Nazi island.

In the end, Angels & Demons is a mixed bag of satisfying popcorn fun that really tries too hard at not doing enough. If you want to have a more cerebral action hero in Robert Langdon, by all means, but in the process of making him a walking/talking Wikipedia would it kill the façade of the professorial type if he threw a punch every once in a while. One would think that after all the stuff that went down in Da Vinci that Langdon might have hit a boxing gym for a couple of months. But he didn’t I guess, and that’s okay. But if Ron Howard and gang want to go for the hat trick with this series, then for the love of Jeff at least make Professor Langdon as tough as the Professor from Gilligan’s Island.

Charlie Wilson's War

Rating: ***1/2

The screenwriter of Charlie Wilson’s War is Aaron Sorkin, the creator and primary writer of the four-time Emmy-winner for Best Drama Series, The West Wing. The West Wing, of course, was a popular TV show about the goings on of the presidential staff of Democrat Josiah Bartlet; a righteous group of patriots doing their best with the power they have on a weekly basis. In a bizarre kind of way Charlie Wilson’s War is sort of like the anti-West Wing, a tale of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, especially when the people running the show are operating so far out of their comfort zone, they don’t realize when they’ve taken things too far.

Based on a book by George Crile, the movie tells of how a little known congressman from Texas was able to help launch a covert war against the Soviets by giving Afghan fighters the tools and training need to repel the Red Army and stop them from taking over Afghanistan. Wilson (Tom Hanks) takes his duties rather lightly until Texas socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) convinces him to look into the plight of the Afghans. Wilson begins collaborating with disgruntled CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) on getting the Afghans weapons and CIA training to fight back, nearly single-handedly changing history in the process.

Admittedly, I think that this is an important story and its very interesting watching it unfold, but I have to say that overall it seems woefully implausible as presented by Sorkin and Director Mike Nichols. The script is very comedic and while I don’t have to be convinced of the frequent ridiculousness of government, the material seemed to be treated with a degree of frivolousness that’s like a denial of the seriousness of their position and their situation.

Having said that though, the script is superb; it has all the usual Sorkin zing-a-zing dialogue and a well paced narrative that tells the story neatly with subtle subtext. The piece is also well acted, with the triumvirate of Hanks, Roberts and Hoffman doing exceptional work. Hoffman especially stands out as tired, old agency hack who has been the voice of reason one too many times to be reasonable anymore. He’s a guy looking for an outlet, a way to do all the things he wanted to do, but couldn’t get past the bureaucracy and red tape to be able to do it, and Charlie Wilson, unbelievably, becomes his in.

On another note, the film is surprisingly preach free, although it does have some hindsight foreshadowing. It’s interesting because of the almost incessant lecturing of Sorkin’s last effort Studio 60, which managed to turn a show about the behind the scenes going on of a comedy sketch show into a soapbox.

In War, there’s reference to the future that American inaction in Afghanistan might yield and did yield. But mostly this is a story and a warning about good intentions and a lesson about the follies of intervening in a situation you barely understand for reasons that really only benefit you. But Charlie Wilson’s War is essential history no matter how many jokes are filled into the script. But it’s wrapped up in an entertaining and insightful package so any inherent weaknesses in plot or plausibility can be overlooked for the benefit of spinning a good yarn.