Children of Men (2006, UK)
The conceit behind in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (adapted from the novel by P.D. James) is so incredibly simple that it belies the complexity what happens onscreen. It is this vision of an intricately detailed future, so close to our daily reality, that is the real triumph of Cuaron's film. I found the visuals more affecting than the story of a washed-up revolutionary (a very solid Clive Owen) charged with ferrying the last fertile woman on earth beyond the reach of a totalitarian and despairing Britain. The world of Children of Men is just realistic enough to be truly chilling, and in focusing the fear of the future on an incredibly simple problem – the inability of mankind to procreate – the story does away with overblown conceptualizations. The problem is as simple as it is horrifying.
Perhaps the best visual marker, and the image that has remained in my head, is a long shot of Michelangelo's David, seemingly utterly perfect, whole and out of reach of the human devastation has overtaken London. Seemingly perfect, that is, until the viewer sees that the statue's left thigh has been blown away, and is now held together with a single metal rod. Not only is there no one left capable of repairing the masterpiece - what would be the point in fixing it?
Some plot details may be obvious - betrayal, the mortality of key characters - but in the service of such a richly imagined future, the results are more classic than mundane. Both a messiah parable and companion piece to classics such as Brave New World, Children proves Cuaron's talent in a more substantial way than Y tu mama tambien, or his entertaining installment of the Harry Potter franchise.
posted by molly m. at 10:42 AM
2 Comments:
I also thought that COM was a stirring comment on British imperialism. From the Union Jacks displayed in workers cubicles, to videos touting to passengers how only Britons 'soldier on' when the rest of the world has crumbled as a train slowly careers through a ruined, apocalyptic landscape in which the majority of the citizenry do anything but, to the decadent opulence in which the upper class continued to live behind palace walls, it is clear that the center does not hold, and that the veneer, once cobbled together of arrogance, denial, and petulance is crumbling. When Clive Owen's character, Theo, asks his cousin, who collects the world's remaining art treasures, how he can bear to do so, knowing full well that no one will survive to see them, his cousin answers, "I just don't think about it." Indeed.
5:12 PM
One of my favorite little hidden jokes in the movie is a graffiti tag briefly visible during Theo's train ride early in the film that says, "Will the last person to die please turn out the lights."
12:52 PM
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