Sometime last year when I went to the movies, I saw a trailer for Children of Men.
I was slightly intrigued by the premise of a world without children and
the need to protect a young woman who miraculously becomes pregnant,
but it looked like another horrifically depressing futuristic film of
the sort I try to avoid, so I didn't give it much more thought. Then, a
month ago, my friend Dan came over with the movie in tow. He hadn't seen
it, but my brother Nathan had, and he gave me two assurances: that it
was a good movie, and that I wouldn't like it. If he's right on the
first count, I'm not the right person to confirm it because he most
assuredly was correct on the second.
Children of Men
plants the audience in a grim world not too far in the future. Since
babies mysteriously stopped being born, everything deteriorated quickly,
leaving mass chaos and widespread violence. Britain is one of the few
places with any sense of order, and that's tenuous at best. The film
begins with the death of the youngest person alive, and as he was a
symbol of hope to everyone, this event throws the entire population into
grief.
In the midst of this tragedy, Theo Faron (Clive Owen)
learns of the pregnancy of Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) and undertakes a
dangerous mission to get her to a spot where she and the baby will be
safe and a team of scientists might be able to figure out how she was
able to conceive, potentially reversing the childlessness that has
plagued the world for the past 20 years or so.
Aiding him from the get-go are several people, among them maternal
Miriam (Pam Ferris); fiery Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), Theo's former
flame; and Jasper Palmer (Michael Caine),
an eccentric old friend of Theo and Julian who provides most of the
film's few comedic moments. He's the only character who really grabbed
my interest, and there's something so deranged about this wild-haired
man fond of giving people "strawberry cough", listening to Ruby Tuesday
and asking folks to pull his finger that I couldn't help but be a
little weirded out by him. Still, I was sorry when he died, as nearly
every character we get to know in this movie does. It reminded me of Saving Private Ryan
in that so many people lose their lives in the effort to save this one
person. In this case, that one person could just spell a new future for
humanity, but that didn't make the violence any less repugnant.
Everything about this is gritty. In most scenes, brutal, militant
officials tote guns around and seem to shoot at anything that moves.
Even in the few scenes in which no one is getting pumped full of lead,
there is nothing of beauty to be seen. A world without children is a
terrible thing to contemplate, and director Alfonso Cuaron makes sure we
get a sense of the magnitude of despair. It's appropriate, I suppose,
that this was the same guy who did Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban;
from the moment the movie started, I felt as though there was a
Dementor in the corner. It took a re-watching of the season one finale
of LOST
to get the feeling out of my system; though that episode contains quite
a lot of harrowing and disconcerting moments, it was a breath of fresh
air compared to this oppressive movie.
Children of Men
is supposed to end on a hopeful note, but few movies have ever left me
feeling so miserable. Maybe my pedestrian mind just can't wrap itself
around such sophisticated vision, or maybe the movie was a failure.
Given my prejudice against these sorts of films, I'm not sure I'm
qualified to say. I will say that Emmanuel Lubezky's cinematography is
effective and unique, wholly pulling viewers into the movie. However,
this was one fictional world I did not want to get pulled into, and no
grand allegory could make up for the endless barrage of violence,
profanity and despair that marked Children of Men.
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