I caught wind of `Cloud Atlas sometime last year, and even posted about it on social media. I must've seen just a trailer, and read a synopsis, and there was something about the film that was truly epic. I am so enthralled, that I've now watched it a few times in the past two weeks. I borrowed the novel from the library, authored by the obviously brilliant David Mitchell, poised to be read.
There is a lot to speak to, but let me focus on three - (1) the acting, (2) the score, and (3) the philosophy - for this week's articles.
For Tom Hanks, Halle Berry & Co., this must've been a load of fun to act in. They had a chance to spread their acting wings, and take on multiple characters in one tapestry of a film. Drawing on the same actors was not only economical and efficient, I imagine, but also imperative to weave the disparate story lines together.
For Tom Hanks, Halle Berry & Co., this must've been a load of fun to act in. They had a chance to spread their acting wings, and take on multiple characters in one tapestry of a film. Drawing on the same actors was not only economical and efficient, I imagine, but also imperative to weave the disparate story lines together.
Two story lines in particular speak to the differing nature of their characters' romance. Berry is Luisa Rey, and Hanks is Isaac Sachs, in 1973 San Francisco. She is a journalist investigating a tip from a nuclear physicist about a big oil companies' conspiracy to trigger a catastrophic accident. He runs into her, as she is snooping for records in an office, but apparently he is taken by her from the get-go and immediately decides to cover for her. They only have a handful of scenes together, before he is killed off. But in a balcony scene, she asks him why he did what he did, and he couldn't quite articulate the reasons. Later on, though, in a voice over, he admits to having fallen in love with her.
While this was a romance that was sudden and unconsummated, they as Zachry and Meronym, on the Big Isle, 106 winters after the Fall (circa 2250), have a slowly developing romance that culminates in their having a large family well into the future. Their relationship was forged from tragedy and horror and from the intimacy that come from an interplanetary journey. Their romance is a natural outcrop, if you will, of what they encounter in their lives, and it is magnificent acting on their part to portray the human complexity of these events for both of them. In a way, Zachry and Meronym consummate what Sachs and Rey did not three centuries before.
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