Cloud Atlas

I finally caught up with the movie, "Cloud Atlas".  I have always been a great fan of David Mitchell's novels, starting with "Ghostwritten", which I heard about when A.S.Byatt declared it her favorite book of the year in the TLS. So I was intrigued when I read about the Wachowski-Twyker film adaptation.  Normally, one of my cardinal rules of film going is to never see a film made from a good book.  (A film made from a bad book is a different story.)  A filmed version can never compete with what our imagination creates from an author's words, and the result is usually some sort of paint-by-numbers version of the book.  But the film-maker's strategy in this case was too audacious to ignore.  Taking Mitchell's six stories, which are told in a kind of palindromic, Russian doll sequence in the novel, and telling them all concurrently is a brilliant idea.  Simply put, viewing the film requires you to have six simultaneous narratives in your head, each set in an entirely different era. Once it gets going, the film shifts abruptly from one story to the other in brilliant feats of editing, so that in the middle of a sci-fi action scene, you are suddenly in an scene on a 19th century ship, with no transitional devices whatsoever.  Six part polyphony!  This is fun, and really subverts the standard Hollywood notions of editing and storytelling.  It also brings to mind D.W. Griffiths equally audacious classic of parallel storytelling, "Intolerance", whose ending features the narrative climax of four different narratives in four different epochs.   So all of this narrative excitement makes up for the frequent stretches of risible dialogue, bad acting, and silly prosthetics that litter the film. (Another cardinal rule of mine is to never see a film which has a classical composer as a character.)   The film makers, like D.W. Griffith before them, are trying to do something very ambitious: whether they succeed or not is almost besides the point.