CLOUD ATLAS

(The Wachowskis, Tom Twyker, 2012)

What Cloud Atlas does is take an "unfilmable" novel, and film it. David Mitchell's wildly ambitious epic novel is considered unfilmable not only because of its vast scale - with six storylines set in six distinct historical locations and dozens of important characters it presents a logistical nightmare - but because of its engagement with big themes of the type with which cinema traditionally struggles.
But the Wachowskis are nothing if not ambitious filmmakers, as anyone who has seen The Matrix trilogy or even their underrated flop Speed Racer will attest. Their collaborator here, German director Tom Twyker, has some history with adapting difficult novels, too, having brought Perfume to the screen in 2006.
Together they have managed to wrestle Mitchell's book into a big, wild mess of a film, replacing his russian doll structure with a more epileptic crosscutting but suggesting the interconnectedness that is one of Mitchell's implicit themes through the stunt of each cast member playing multiple roles across the various storylines. Thus Tom Hanks is the lead in the 2321 segments, playing Zachry, a goat farmer in a post-apocalyptic wilderness ("106 winters after the fall") whose encounter with Halle Berry's Meronym, a member of a society with some technology from before the fall changes both of their worlds, and he shows up in smaller parts in every other segment, as a poisoner-doctor in the 1849 segments, a hotel owner in 1936 Edinburgh, a Nuclear Scientist (who encounters and falls for another Berry character) in 1973's conspiracy thriller, an Irish gangster-author in 2012's dark comedy and an actor glimpsed in an old film in the dystopian sci-fi of 2144. In each story he is buried under make-up, bad teeth and a wig, and his accents jump across the globe, and the rest of the cast suffer exactly the same fate. Bae Doona and Jim Sturgess play a genetically-engineered clone and the underground rebel who releases her from a life of servitude in the 2144 section, and their affecting love story is mirrored by the same actors playing a couple in 1849, while Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant play varieties of evil across the ages, from Weaving's satanic "old Georgie" whispering in Zachry's ear, and Grant's Cannibal Warrior in 2321; to a Corporate CEO and his hired assassin in 1973. Sometimes the directors time their edits with the subtlety of a plane crash to underline the connections, and yet, at others the juxtapositions and similarities are unexpectedly moving.
All of this is a little undermined by the distancing, even distracting effect of all the make-up and the wigs - especially so when there are recognisably white actors playing Asian characters and vice versa - but it works more than it has any right to. Some sections are a lot better than others, and so the two sci-fi stories, directed by the Wachowskis, are the most compelling and beautiful on show here, while Twyker's 2012 black comedy starring Jim Broadbent and 1973 thriller are by far the weakest portions.
The themes the film attempts to engage with are so big and earnest that they need to be handled precisely, but instead there is a vagueness throughout that makes much of it feel a little too fuzzy and new age to have any meaningful resonance. Freedom is important, get it? Love too, thats a good thing.
The last act is filled with climaxes, and since the filmmakers turn more or less all of them into action scenes it plays like a long series of cliches and over-familiar set-ups, no matter that some of them feature excellence on a technical level. A barroom brawl follows a car-chase through a future city follows a skirmish with cannibals in the trees follows a gunfight and pursuit, etc etc.
But there are flashes of dazzling cinema here; with the Wachowskis in particular retaining some of their eye for what really works in genre storytelling and ability to world-build on a grand scale; and the cast are generally extremely impressive throughout. Bae Doona and Ben Whishaw particularly impress, and the photography by John Toll and Frank Griebe is suitably lush and stunning.
For such a long, ambitious film, Cloud Atlas is never remotely boring. If it is never quite good, either, that is down to a variety of factors, the most important of which brings me back to the first thing I said. some books are considered "unfilmable" for a reason.

CROSSING OVER

(Wayne Kramer, 2009)

Based on his early work, Kramer seemed a promising young genre director. Those films - The Cooler and Running Scared - while never particularly original or interesting, were full of pulp energy, good work from actors and solid storytelling. It may be telling that the only truly compelling scene in Crossing Over, his ambitious attempt to make a panoramic, multi-strand real world epic, is the closest to genre material the entire film ever comes. An immigration cop finds himself in a gas station convenience store as it is held up by a bunch of Korean gang-bangers, and once he draws his gun, Kramer pulls out a terrifically gripping scene of thrilling action which is brilliantly put together.
Aside from that, too much here feels like dull tv movie material.
That's a shame, because this is a laudably serious, worthy subject; the varying experiences of illegal immigrants and the government workers who deal with them in modern California. Kramer runs about six separate strands in parallel, allowing them to intersect as the film progresses, contrasting the struggles of a Muslim Pakistani family who stray into the crosshairs of the FBI, with the story of a young Australian Actress sleeping with an Immigration clerk to get a green card, with a young Mexican mother deported and trying to cross back into America and more. Then there are the agents; Harrison Ford's conscience-stricken immigration cop, Ashley Judd's clucky attorney and Cliff Curtis as Ford's partner, battling with his wild younger sister.
It's ambition is part of the problem; none of the stories really gets enough time or weight, meaning that when it reaches the big emotional climax stage, little of it really stings the way it should. That may be partly down to the fact that it was butchered in editing - Sean Penn famously had an entire storyline cut out, meaning he's no longer even in the film - and it was controversially altered to avoid explicit reference to "honour killings" in one narrative strand, but it doesn't explain everything. It's also distractingly contrived, many of the narrative links annoyingly tenuous, filled with easy stereotypes instead of fully-formed characters (the kindly rabbi, the racist classmates, the cocky lawyer etc) and it lacks the vitality and style of Kramer's early work; it looks and sounds a little boring.
There are good things; a few of the scenes have the cheap, undeniable potency of a good pop song in their emotional peaks and troughs, and some of the performances - mainly from the lesser-known cast-members - are terrific, even in the little time devoted to some of these characters.
But generally, this is a missed opportunity, and one that seems to have damaged Kramer's career; he hasn't directed a film since.