Now and Then

The too-timely future of Children of Men.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jan 3, 2007

Set in a dystopian future where human infertility has reduced hope for the species to a flickering ember, Children of Men is nominally science fiction, but it's neither scientific nor particularly fictitious. Director Alfonso Cuarón shows little interest in offering even speculative rationales for the global sterility epidemic, and even less in exploring the distance between his future and the present day. Visions of the future inevitably function as reflections of their own particular present, but Cuarón erases any doubt by minimizing the temporal and social displacement: His 2027 intentionally looks like 2007 with the names changed.

Read Sam Adams' interview with Alfonso Cuarón.

Loosely adapting P.D. James' novel, Cuarón, who is one of five credited screenwriters, goes light on the sci-fi trappings and packs the movie full of references to current events; flat-screens warn citizens to beware of illegal immigrants, and an apparent terrorist bombing decimates a metropolitan coffee shop. There's even a cameo from Abu Ghraib's hooded man if you look closely enough. The future is now.

It ought to be enough to drive humanity's last vestiges to outright hysteria, but in the last stronghold of civilized society, Clive Owen's indifferent Theo strides coldly on. A former revolutionary who's since joined the private sector, Theo seems to have successfully extinguished every last shred of optimism — in a world with no prospects, life without hope is easier to bear.

The Ilsa to Theo's Rick arrives in the form of Julian (Julianne Moore), his former lover and comrade-in-arms. The past is something no one on earth much wants to think about, but Julian skillfully taps their bygone relationship to enlist Theo's help in smuggling a refugee named Kee (Claire-Hope Aishtley) out of the country, a journey that takes them through scarred countryside and a bombed-out prison camp to the island's mist-shrouded shores. Exactly who, or what, they'll be meeting is never quite clear, nor at first is Kee's importance, but Theo goes along, perhaps because in a world where the government distributes suicide kits free of charge, he truly has nothing to lose.

There's so much good in Children of Men it's a shame it doesn't fit together better. The movie is more concerned with texture than technicalities, which means that we get an awfully good sense of what the world of 2027 looks like but very little sense of how it works. The movie often feels like a set of themes strung together by a perfunctory plot, bluntly formulating its concerns but not fully working them out. Fertility, check. Immigration, check, Terrorism, check. Now what does what have to do with whom? Most critically, Cuarón never even gestures to a link between the fertility crisis and the anti-immigrant paranoia that has turned Britain into a virtual prison camp. It's clear that Cuarón cares passionately about the movie's subjects, but it feels as if he's simply stocked his future world with present-day concerns without linking them up in any meaningful or, more importantly, thought-provoking way. It's as if the world has been attacked by a pack of raging metaphors.

The movie's thematic clumsiness is all the more stark in contrast to its dazzling visual sophistication. Shadowing his progressively engaged protagonist into a series of increasingly dangerous encounters, Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki stage the movie as a succession of virtuosic long takes which are indisputably among the most breathtaking in the history of the medium. I hesitate to say too much about them in specific, since they tend to occur at key moments in the plot, but it's worth saying that they're as graceful as they are purposeful. Technique-minded viewers will count the minutes without a visible cut (a few edits are camouflaged by CGI or whip pans), but it's surprisingly easy to get swept up in the graceful bob and weave of Lubezki's camera movement. Even when he's not following Theo into combat, as he does in the most elaborate and outright jaw-dropping of the movie's sequence shots, Lubezki treats the future like one big battle zone.

In such moments of visual poetry, Children of Men is thrillingly alive. But it falls back to earth when the movie tries too hard to make itself relevant. If Cuarón had speculated more boldly, he might have connected more potently. As it is, Children of Men feels like a movie not about the future or the present, but one whose time is already ever so slightly past.

(sam@citypaper.net)

Children of Men

Directed by Alfonso CuarónA Universal releaseOpens Friday at Ritz East

 

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