Cloud Atlas

Or, you can't makeup this sh*t.

If you were going to make a movie of David Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas, a huge, sprawling epic of interwoven stories, the directors of The Matrix and Run Lola Run might seem like just the people to do it. But to make a long story short, three's a crowd and too many cooks spoil the broth.

Cloud Atlas isn't shy about its fundamental premise of eternal recurrence. It says we humans keep fighting the same battles, in every society, in every age. The big challenge in a movie like this is usually tying everything together so the audience doesn't feel drawn and quartered by the storyline. Cloud Atlas does this fairly well. The transitions between stories are intriguing; one transition, mediated by the transformation of the clickety-clack of a train into the hoofbeats of an enemy, is particularly Hitchcockian. 

It would be understandable if Cloud Atlas chose to recast some of the same actors in different parts in different stories, as well, in order to underscore the connections between them. But it actually goes further than that. The same handful of actors actually play every major character, in every story, in every historical era.

This is a very high-stakes gambit, and I can see why it might be a very attractive challenge to any capable director, and why it would be extremely appealing to any talented actor. The best actors are revealed when they play against type. I spent years rolling my eyes at George Clooney's alpha-male swagger, until I saw him play a loser in Michael Clayton and believed him. Personally, I think Cate Blanchett's greatest triumph isn't Elizabeth, but Pushing Tin, in which she plays a Long Island housewife. I'm from Noo Yawk myself, so I should know.

I can even see how it might be tempting to push this acting exercise even further, and ask the actors to play characters of a different gender or a different race. One of the directors, Lana Wachowski, used to be Larry Wachowski, so I truly sympathize with her desire to prove that it is possible for us to become anyone that we truly want to become; that if we truly radiate femininity from the inside out it doesn't matter what our exterior objectively is.

To some extent, the failure of this experiment has to be laid at the feet of the makeup department, because in most cases the actors just look like they’re wearing Halloween masks. However, some of the actors have to take their lumps as well. After all, all Hugh Grant has to do is fake a credible American accent in one scene, and he fails spectacularly.

Hugo Weaving, who has to play Nurse Ratched to a bunch of unjustly imprisoned geezers, just doesn't have the femininity of Lana Wachowski, and simply comes off like a man in a drag. That’s no small irony, considering that the first movie I ever saw him in was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

The cross-gender casting is not very successful here, but it's been pulled off before (The Crying Game, anyone?) The cross-racial casting, on the other hand, ranges from the merely clumsy to the totally disastrous. Every time it happens, you can't help thinking, "is that..." and it takes you completely out of the movie. Halle Berry, for instance, looks profoundly uncomfortable as a blond Jewish woman. Actually, since I'm Jewish, I'm not sure who's more uncomfortable–her or me. 

Jim Sturgess has his eyes almondized to play Korean insurgent Hae-Joo Chang. While Sturgess deserves credit for pulling this trick off better than his colleagues, having a white actor play an Asian character seems at best historically ignorant and at worst brazenly offensive. It's creepily reminiscent of the early days in Hollywood, where Richard Barthelmess played a Chinese shopkeeper in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms. To be fair, in Cloud Atlas Asian actors also play white characters–and fail just as miserably.

Ironically, Broken Blossoms is very much like Cloud Atlas in that it means so well and fails so miserably in its progressive desires. After all, in an ideal world, wouldn't all casting be race-blind and even gender-blind? When the crew of the Enterprise puts on Death of a Salesman in the rec room, maybe Uhura plays Willy Loman opposite Sulu as Linda. (Irony alert #2: Avery Brooks, who played Captain Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has played Willy Loman.)

The thing is that this will only work when we can do it without the makeup.