Children of Men
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An impressive slice of apocalyptic sci-fi set in Britain works better as action movie than religious allegory
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(114 mins, 15)
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron; starring Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor
In his great essay 'The Crack-Up', written at a personal low ebb in 1936, Scott Fitzgerald said: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.' When facing the future knowing that hope invariably turns to disappointment or when confronted by depressingly apocalyptic science fiction, I always think of Fitzgerald's words.
Inevitably, they came to mind last week seeing the British SF movie Children of Men, directed by versatile Mexican Alfonso Cuaron, who last worked in this country on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the darkest and, many believe, the best of the JK Rowling films. Children of Men is adapted by Cuaron and American television writer Timothy J Sexton from an uncharacteristic 1992 novel by the genteel British thriller writer PD James, a woman of conservative views and strong Anglican convictions.
The setting is the hideously polluted, run-down London of 2027 in an authoritarian Britain, the only functioning nation in Europe and, possibly, in the world and, thus, a magnet for refugees. A brutal paramilitary police force is barely in control of a general chaos. Its chief role appears to be rounding up immigrants, referred to sneeringly as 'fugees', either shooting or forcibly deporting them. The principal countervailing force to a corrupt government is an underground resistance group known as the Fish, made up of immigrants and their British sympathisers, called 'Cods'; they seem to be internally divided between agitators seeking to influence a demoralised public and outright terrorists.
This is familiar stuff, the subject of recent British films as different as Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and James McTeigue's V for Vendetta. The former presented a Britain suddenly reduced to barbarism as a result of a plague and a dangerous, denuded, rubbish-strewn London; the latter gave us a future Britain in which a dictatorial government ruled through violence and a masked avenger incited the public to fight back.
A similarly oppressive atmosphere is palpably rendered in Children of Men by production designers Geoffrey Kirkland and Jim Clay, one American, the other British, and Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The picture is of almost unrelieved gloom, nearer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than to the first great British futuristic picture, the Korda version of HG Wells's Things to Come. There is, perhaps, some consolation for local audiences in feeling that London is once again the hub of the Empire and that they are at the centre of the apocalypse, rather than observing it from the periphery. Old patriotic emotions are aroused by the sight of a future Britain devastated on screen rather than the spectacle of Los Angeles being laid waste or Martians landing in New Jersey instead of, as HG Wells told it, menacing the Home Counties.
The movie that Children of Men most brings to mind is the 1990 adaptation by Harold Pinter of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. Both are examples of what might be called obstetric or gynaecological dystopian sci-fi. The Handmaid's Tale, as a film at least, is a glum, portentous feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four set in an America run by right-wing fundamentalists, where blacks, homosexuals and radicals are either exterminated or deported to death camps abroad. The few fertile women are forced to serve as handmaids, bearing the children of the nation's leaders whose wives are barren. Children of Men moves rather more briskly but has a similar theme. For no specific reason, no child has been born in this ghastly new world for 18 years, which is to say since 2008. Pollution, genetic experimentation and uncontrollable diseases are suggested as the causes. I believe PD James hints at a judgment of God, her novel being Christian and moral, whereas Atwood's is social and political.
The film begins with its hero, the disillusioned idealist Theo Faron, a forceful Clive Owen, hearing the announcement on television in a London cafe that the world's youngest person, 18-year-old Diego Ricardo, has been murdered in Latin America. Immediately after Theo leaves, the cafe is destroyed by a terrorist bomb. Death and the extinction of an apparently irredeemably transgressive mankind are thus announced as the theme. Theo is then abducted by members of the Fish and brought before their leader, the American Julian (Julianne Moore), who, it transpires, was Theo's former partner and mother of his child. They split up after the boy died in the influenza pandemic of 2009.
The Fish want Theo to use his influence with his cousin, a leading figure in the government, to obtain transit papers for a young woman to get to the south coast. In a visually striking scene, Theo visits this relative in his palatial offices, a combination of Tate Modern and the Battersea Power Station, where Picasso's Guernica, retrieved from a depleted Spain, hangs on the dining room wall.
The permit he receives dictates that he must travel with the recipient, who turns out to be (something I knew from the film's explicit trailer) a pregnant black girl, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey). The rebels intend that she be taken to 'the Human Project', a refuge somewhere abroad created by scientists, artists and other people of good will as the best hope of mankind, though this legendary place may well be a chimera. The movie then proceeds as a cross between a religious allegory and an action movie.
The allegorical aspect is underlined by John Tavener's score entitled 'Fragment of a Prayer', which alternates between requiem and choral uplift; at a crucial moment, a boat called Tomorrow emerges from the fog. But Kee isn't a virgin, she doesn't know who is the father, and her child is a girl, though revered by those who see her as if she were the Messiah. The action aspect, which has a high body count, is more convincing. As the increasingly devoted Theo escorts Kee to a rendezvous with agents of the Human Project, he fights both with the Fish and the ruthless authorities. Using whisky as a disinfectant, he delivers the baby in Bexhill, which has been turned into a refugee camp and resembles 1945 Berlin or the set of John Carpenter's Escape from New York
On the way, they stay with Theo's elderly friend, Jasper, an ageing, ex-political cartoonist who supports himself by growing marijuana in his rural hideaway and whose farting provides the film's only comic relief. He's played by Michael Caine who, with beard and mane of white hair, appears to be giving an impersonation of Richard Harris as Methuselah.
But this impressive, properly pessimistic film doesn't need conventional comic relief. What the narrative demands, and what Cuaron provides, is moral ambiguity and a teasing hopefulness that suggests the possibility of redemption.This is quite an achievement.
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