Children of Men

Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld

Posted January 15, 2007

I like a great screenplay as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: film is primarily a visual medium. It provides a stimulation the written word cannot. I’ve got nothing against a film like Glengarry Glen Ross, which is essentially a stage play on celluloid, or a film like Mystic River, where the director deftly “gets out of the way” of the plot and his actors. As a matter of fact, I think those are a couple of first class movies, and in each case I think the directors made mostly wise choices in bringing them to the screen. But compare them to Apocalypse Now, where the director has crafted a work of art that can be experienced only through the medium of film. No collection of words can possibly stimulate the brain in quite the same way as Frances Ford Coppola’s opening cinematic collage, with all those helicopters and napalm and Martin Sheen sweating and boozing beneath the spinning blades of a ceiling fan. That’s because words stimulate only the intellect, while film stimulates the senses. Words may tell us something about the world, but film shows us. Great filmmakers understand this, and work accordingly. Coppola, for instance, did not learn his craft just so he could someday resist the temptation to use it. He became a filmmaker because he wanted to tell stories with images. If he were humbler with his talent, imagine what we might have lost?

Likewise Alfonso Cuarón, director of the new film Children of Men. Here is a filmmaker who is not afraid of the power he wields. He’s taken a great plot, an efficient screenplay, a profound theme, and top-notch actors, and he’s iced the cake with exhilarating craftsmanship. Utilizing to full extent the tools of his trade, he’s given us a film that illustrates, in our troubled modern times, nothing less urgent than the value of human life.

From its first minute Children of Men creates a believable and frightening reality. As the film opens we receive a news report of a senseless killing, and then moments later a bomb explodes in a crowded coffee shop. We see bodies, debris and smoke. It’s a world as dangerous and crazy as our own.

But as it turns out, we’ve been introduced to a future dystopia. The year is 2027, and England is the last nation standing in a world that has collapsed. We find ourselves in London, a totalitarian state where immigrants are rounded up, caged in public, and herded into camps for deportation. Technology is used for surveillance and propaganda, while the masses commute in old double-decker buses, or are seen, at times, pedaling jalopies or tending livestock in the streets. Legal citizens are frequently reminded, on plasma-screen billboards, that harboring immigrants is a crime. What’s more, fertility testing is mandatory. That’s because for eighteen years now, no babies have been born. No one knows why. But clearly, humankind is running out of tomorrows.

With painstaking detail, Cuarón creates a reality of widespread despair. It can be felt not only in the faces of the actors, but in the surroundings they inhabit. There is palpable hopelessness in the burned-out cars, the piles of rubble, the crumbling buildings, and graffiti-streaked walls. Even the countryside is vile, with polluted drainage ditches, and abandoned piles of livestock carcasses. This is a world where no one cares anymore. So when we are finally treated to images of a pregnant woman’s belly, and later on, to the birth of her infant child, we have been thoroughly primed to feel the hope this development presents. This is masterful psychological manipulation by the director. Human birth is an everyday miracle for the viewers who have paid for their tickets and taken their seats. But halfway through Children of Men, a newborn infant feels like nothing less than the salvation of mankind.

The child has been born into a dangerous world. It is the task of the film’s heroes, Theo (played by Clive Owen), and Kee, the child’s mother (played by Claire Hope-Ashitey), to deliver the infant out of England to a sanctuary called “The Human Project.” As the film reaches its climax, and the heroes spirit the world’s last child through a harrowing battle between government and up-risers, we find ourselves fully engaged by a potentially hackneyed sci-fi theme, for once again, we are at the movies, and the fate of the human race is at stake. This time, thankfully, our salvation will not come from battle plans or intercepted communications. It’s not war but life that will save us, if our heroes can deliver this one innocent and thoroughly helpless creature out of harm’s way.

Alfonso Cuarón’s filmmaking is thrilling. There are at least four long takes, single un-cut shots that tell their own mini story, with action, suspense, changes of scenery, various character interactions, and developments of plot. At least two of these shots might have been ten minutes long, with casts of hundreds, bullets flying, motorcycle stunts, explosions, and serious emotional consequences, not to mention all the actors hitting their marks. This filmmaking technique—the long take—first gained notoriety in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, and it has popped up recently in Gangs of New York, War of the Worlds, and Pride and Prejudice. The tactic never fails to impress me, but in the case of Children of Men, I cannot fathom how some of these shots might have been staged.

However, Cuarón is not merely showing off, or fishing for “attaboys” from his fellow directors. He is using this technique in furtherance of his film’s urgent message: that life is fragile. In these long un-cut sequences we watch people and events come and go, and it gives us a sense of what the characters experience, that time carries us forward and leaves others behind, and all we can do is watch.

The quieter scenes are no less poetic. Of particular interest is the use of animals in the film. For starters, nearly all of these childless characters have dogs, and it seemed to me the dogs were universally well-treated, even by villainous characters—a realistic touch in a world where people have nowhere to channel their nurturing instincts. There’s one funny scene in which Kee, who realizes she is quickly losing benefactors, latches unequivocally onto Theo, after which he looks down to find a kitten clinging to his leg. These animals serve a poetic function, but their presence also makes clear to the audience that the human species alone is in jeopardy. The dogs and cats are reproducing just fine. It’s not the world coming to end, just us.

There’s even an appearance by a triceratops. Out in front of a trashed, abandoned grade school stands a life-sized sculpture of the dinosaur that Sam Neill, in Jurassic Park, claimed “was his favorite when he was a kid.” In that film the beast was resurrected. In this one, it serves as a reminder of our planet’s most famously extinct species.

Like any great filmmaker, Cuarón references his predecessors. The government-sponsored suicide drug recalls Soylent Green. The animated billboards and omnipresent advertising reminded me of Blade Runner and Minority Report. The trips to the country evoke the rural scenes in A.I. And the combat scenes owe everything to Saving Private Ryan. Furthermore, Cuarón, not content to reference only films, actually conjures the magic of Pink Floyd in one scene, in which an art maven has recreated the cover of the 1977 album Animals outside his window. I was startled and heart-warmed to see that giant inflatable pig hovering above those rigor-mortified smokestacks. The choice was no doubt personal for Cuarón, but also appropriate to the film, considering the meaningful presence of animals, and the fact that Pink Floyd’s album was itself a nod to George Orwell’s fascist Animal Farm characters.

Children of Men is primarily a director’s movie, but the acting is uniformly excellent as well. The aforementioned Claire Hope-Ashitey is brilliant, both naïve and instinctively maternal, as the world’s only fertile woman. Julianne Moore is smart and tough as a former girlfriend who re-sparks Theo’s idealism. Michael Caine plays Jasper, an old pot-smoking hippie who has maintained his dignity, his sense of humor, and even his joy despite the coming apocalypse. And then there’s Clive Owen as Theo. This actor can do no wrong.

Clive Owen is the perfect modern day hero. He’s able to refashion classic notions of heroism without undermining them. On his face, and in his body language, we get not only the sense of moral duty, but the cynicism it outweighs. The noble decision, for Clive, is always difficult, and yet he comes through—and he’s perfectly able to play this challenge out without the help of the screenplay or plot points. It’s just there in his energy. Also, and I say this with all due respect to the considerable acting talents of Johnny Depp and Tobey McGuire, Clive Owen is able to convincingly punch a guy’s lights out. It’s rare these days for an actor to convey pure, above-board testosterone and not come across as ridiculous. But Clive Owen pulls the feat off nicely, and repeatedly, in this film and throughout all his work.

Children of Men is gloomy and violent. On a cold, rainy day, if you are headed to the theatres, you might be inclined away from this movie. See it anyway. Your spirits will recover, and meanwhile there is joy in seeing any film that is worth your time. Movies don’t get any better than this. It’s true, we are treated, these days, to frequent labors of love by artistic directors, but it is particularly gratifying to see a labor of urgency this time, great filmmaking and convincing acting in service of a profound and topical theme. Children of Men illustrates the nature of hope. In this film, we see that we are hopeless without our tomorrows, and our tomorrows are guaranteed not by the brainchildren of technology, but by the human child, the child of the womb.

© 2007 Theo Michelfeld