In 2027, Seattle has been under siege for three years, illegal immigration is punishable by death, and the youngest human being on the planet dies at the age of eighteen. This is how Children Of Men begins, with the world teetering on the brink between fascism and anarchy. Mankind has mysteriously stopped reproducing, and rather than indulging in excessively orgiastic rituals, the world’s population seems content to glumly wait for the end.
The violence in Children Of Men is spontaneous, ugly, and pervasive. Like the Beirut or Baghdad of the evening news, it rains down in unpredictable, odd intervals, as if mankind refuses the quiet dignity of extinction and prefers to rush the job by its own hand. Living under martial law and perpetually grey London skies, Theo (Clive Owen) has grown so numb that the terror bombings are minor annoyances compared to his hangovers. When a stop for coffee narrowly turns fatal, in a sudden, sickening instant, Theo barely blinks. The bone rattling crunch of explosives is shocking, assaultive even, for those of us fortunate enough to live outside of war zones. In London of 2027, it’s not worth a second glance.
Not even his own kidnapping gets much of a rise from Theo, even if it is masterminded by his ex-wife who is leading one of the insurgent groups. Julian, played with coppery resolve by Julianne Moore, wants travel papers and Theo has a cousin who can get them. A torch still burns for his ex-, but it’s the chance to subvert the system that finally motivates Theo.
He soon winds up on the lam with a living miracle – a surly teenaged illegal immigrant who happens to be nine months pregnant. Pursued by both the government and the resistance movements, Theo has to spirit the world’s only pregnant woman to a rendezvous with an off-shore haven. Shockingly, fascism seems only to breed more fascism, and the resistance turns out to be just as vicious as the government, and just as intolerant of dissent. The only relief comes from Jasper (Michael Caine), an aging hippie content to stay high and listen to classic rock until the curtain falls.
The good news is that the director Alfonso Cuaron is working at the top of his game; there’s not a moment in the film that feels adrift. As grim as the world appears, the storytelling is alive and electric. While the film remains firmly focused on Theo, the background is alive with detail – apocalyptic headlines, burning bodies, and prophetic graffiti. Cuaron’s wit is both sly and bold, and even if Theo isn’t very emotive, the world is humming with details of its impending extinction. The film’s niftiest visual gag involves the Battersea power plant and a famous album cover.
Working in perfect rhythm with Cuaron is his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and his co-editor Alex Rodriquez, the whole film unspools almost seamlessly. In the early going, Cuaron twice lets the camera roll through a single action sequence in a single take. The long take is one of the boldest, and in most cases, self-consciously showy statements a director can make. To make it work right, you have to coordinate hundreds of elements and pray for a hundred more lucky breaks. Without the safety of editing, the random explosions of violence are gripping and the tension is thrilling to the edge of asphyxiation. There are no stunt doubles, no CGI tricks; it feels as real as film possibly can. No other technique can really capture the destabilizing shock of violence, and Cuaron uses it very wisely. (Also, his editor cuts the film so fluidly that when he steps back and lets a shot play out, you aren’t even aware of the first few edit-free minutes.)
The third time is the charm, though, and the centerpiece of Children Of Men is a nine minute long action sequence that runs in an uninterrupted single camera take. This sequence alone is worth the price of admission for every film student and technical aficionado out there. As the minutes go by, and the scope of the shot expands outward, from an alley fight to a sidewalk shootout to a full scale army shelling, you begin to wait breathlessly for the next edit. How far can this be pushed? How long can the director keep this going? It’s distracting to marvel at the technical ingenuity while the story continues to unfold with a grim relentlessness. In pure dramatic terms, this one shot probably goes too far, because marveling at the technical virtuosity trumps the narrative climax of the film.
Nothing liberates the imagination like the end of the world. It is, pardon the pun, fertile ground for science fiction. The light of an onrushing apocalypse allows an artist to strip away all the tedium of day-to-day life, and examine the world of today through the worst-case light of tomorrow. It is up to the artist to sell the apocalypse, to make the new-world rules plausible and compelling enough to let our imaginations suspend disbelief and see how the worst-case scenario will play itself out.
Children Of Men sets up the end of the world quite well, but it never sells the despair the way the story demands. It is visually arresting but not rewarding, with a sharp disconnect between the urgency of the storytelling and the world of the story. Part of the problem is that the film is firmly focused on the opaque and disaffected Theo. Clive Owen turns in a masterful performance of a man discovering a renewed sense of purpose, but watching a furrowed brow and a hangover is distancing. Especially in such a detail rich canvas, his quietude is alienating and leaves you with the feeling that you’re watching the grey blur in the center of a vibrant Pollock masterpiece.
It is also interesting that a Mexican-born director has made a movie that’s more about illegal immigration and the fear of terrorism than the end of the world. As it turns out, the infertility is a Macguffin. This action could take place in any post-nuclear war Orwellian world. However, the paranoia is out of step; twenty years ago we feared nuclear extinction. Today, we might fear illegal immigration, but we aren’t collectively terrified enough of any impending cultural extinction to round up the traitors and shoot them.
Children Of Men seems so enraptured with its vision of the end of things, that it gets too tentative to question them. After Theo quite literally delivers the pregnant woman through a dark tunnel and into the light of a new day, the movie, like Theo, runs out of steam. The “what if’s” remain unexplored and the “how did we get here’s” go completely unanswered. It delivers some heart pounding good times, and generates more than a fair share of hair-raising moments, but it doesn’t connect beneath the surface. The road to nowhere, however, has rarely been more thrilling.
Leave a Reply