Cloud Atlas is at its most successfully symphonic near its midpoint, once its various locations and time frames have been established and the cross-cutting among them achieves a visual and thematic resonance. Two parallel scenes of attempted liberation – a slave’s leap from a ship’s mast in 1849 and a fugitive’s escape via a bridge between skyscrapers in Neo Seoul – use a sense of extreme height to generate suspense, thereby amplifying each other (as well as the third, less dynamic, thread in the sequence, of Berry’s journalist sneaking into an office at an energy company she’s investigating). In this way, the movie is something akin to one of the concerti grossi of Handel or Bach, in which the music is passed back and forth among a small group of soloists and a full orchestra (a music professor who knows much more about this than I do pointed me to Handel’s Twelve Grand Concertos and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 as examples).
So Cloud Atlas’ self-imposed, musical allusions are more than a grasping for pretension, then. Tykwer and the Wachowskis are talented enough to pull it off, at least in structural terms. But to what end?
If the movie’s construction is intricate, its handling of its main thematic concern is the opposite…
Read the rest of the review at Larsen on Film.
