Monday, September 25, 2006
Review: Children Of Men
Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men is the film War of the Worlds wanted to be in its depiction of the breakdown of society, the film V for Vendetta wanted to be in its depiction of a future England given over to fascism and, in its depiction of racism and the lot of refugees in the first world, it would be better than any other mainstream Hollywood film if mainstream Hollywood actually made films about these things. Crash doesn't count on account of it not being a real film, dammit. The question is whether it is better than fellow Mexican Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (review here) which Cuaron produced, is another masterpiece and is another contender for film of the year.
Pan's Labyrinth is a fairy tale and, while portraying some very hard realities, remains very romantic in tone. Children of Men, while having some mythical overtones, is relentlessly realistic in approach. It may come down to a question of taste as to how you like your stories told - Labyrinth is more luxurious and dream-like, Children of Men is more immediate and visceral - but together, almost by themselves, they make 2006 a great year for movies.
Children of Men is set in an England 20 years in the future where terrorism and the first world's response of increased security and lower personal freedoms has made life much harder and bleaker. Added to this is that there have been no births in just over 18 years. Women became infertile, almost over night, and that was that. The population is getting older, there is very little hope and civilisation seems to be waiting around to die.
This is represented by main character Theo, played by Clive Owen, who has a history of political activism but now numbly sleepwalks through life drinking, smoking marijuana and being habitually depressed. Then an old girlfriend, played by Julianne Moore, turns up and introduces him to Kee, a young illegal refugee, who is, somehow, 8 months pregnant.
It's really difficult to get the future right on film. Partly because most sci-fi is aimed at children and the terminally immature, leading to shiny spaceships and muscle-bound mutants, partly because the future will always reflect the fashions of the time it was made, making, for example, most 'futures' from the sixties seem incredibly dated, and partly because the art department will tend to design the life out of it. Children of Men, while being a liberal's vision of what would happen if all the bad parts of our current society were maginified, gets it satisfyingly right - and this comes from a life-long Londoner, ready to arrogantly scoff at any foreigner's attempt at recreating the city I know (and love, and hate) so well.
It is filmed mostly in a hand-held, cinema-verite style which lends immediacy to the drama while the sci-fi details (often done with seamless CGI) are added quietly in the background. They get it so entirely right that even when a radio DJ says 'here's a song made all the way back in 2003!', you aren't taken out of the story by the slightly clunky 'Hey! We're in the future!' schtick.
The documentary style of the film makes it feel very hand made, but there is a lot of technical whizz-bangery going on, often invisibly, before your eyes. War of The Worlds was praised for a shot of Tom Cruise driving out of the city that moves in and out of the car, circling and panning for several minutes. There is a shot here that, while not as flash or as slick, easily outdoes it in terms of narrative ambition and, purely technically, in terms of length of shot. The film then, in a battle scene later on, goes and tops it again only to the power of ten. Saving Private Ryan, go fuck yourself.
It is not the technical aspects of these shots that is impressive, it is that they remain utterly gripping, both narratively and thematically, for their entire lengths. Let the nerds obsess over where the secret cuts are while you just soak in some of the most intense sequences put on film this year.
One other interesting aspect of the technical side of things is that low budget films tend to concentrate on the characters because they can not show the larger events happening around them. Big budget films put the larger events front and centre to show off the spectacle. As an audience, you adapt to the budget and watch the films differently. This films plays like a low budget film (it actually has a quite a high budget), and so you become involved in the characters and their faces, not missing the wide shot, and then the camera turns around and shows you the whole thing, perfect and clear. This play on expectations, and this different approach to spectacle, feels new, makes the trickery fresh and, in its own small way, is as breath-taking as seeing the T-Rex walk in Jurassic Park.
The story takes the form of a journey as Theo tries to take the girl to safety while both government and the terrorists chase them and the crumbling world itself seems intent on killing them.
As a child, neither knowing or caring about politics (or believable characters, for that matter), the adult sci-fi film was always a problem for me - promising so much but wasting its time with boring conversations while it could be showing me shiny spaceships and thrilling chases. This film does not really play as a thriller - being too quiet and full of digressions, keeping its plot mechanics mostly under the surface in order to focus on the characters - but the film remains gripping and terrifying and, by the end, there is the genuine and satisfying sense of adventure you get from a good story well told.
Yes we should ignore the nerd-child in all of us, but the child has a point that adult sci-fi can, sometimes to deliberately prove its non-shiny spaceship credentials, get so bogged down in its philosophical dialectics that it forgets its narrative. Children of Men, I think, is a film the nerd-child would enjoy too.
It's also not all relentlessly grim. Battersea Power Station, which is being used to store what artworks have been saved, has a giant balloon of a pig floating over it (look here if you don't know the significance), there's a chase involving nothing but a stalled car, and Michael Caine plays a pot-growing radical hippy complete with scraggly white wig. That this character is believable and funny rather than an embarrassment gives you an idea of the level of performances, and the depth of talent involved.
With so much going on, the film could go in any number of directions, or all of them at once in a big ponderous mess of big weighty issues. As it is, we are shown a world becoming ever more tragic, insane and hopeless, and crashing down on top of one poor girl and the baby she is carrying. The baby becomes a symbol of hope, a source of power and a political weapon to those surrounding it but, to the film's credit, the baby itself remains just a baby, squealing and oblivious, raising the film above just being an excellent political fable or dystopic fantasy to become a genuinely human drama.
This is a level that Pan's Labyrinth, which remains a fairy tale to the end, never really reaches which puts, at first viewing, Children of Men above it. But, as with the silly fascism of any list, why would you put yourself in position of having to choose between them? Both these films open at the end of December in America. Go watch both of them and give yourself a very excellent, if not exactly merry, Christmas.
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