From The Archives: CHILDREN OF MEN (2006).

#9.  Children Of Men (2006)

The year 2027. Women can no longer have babies. The youngest person in the world has just been shot down at the age of 18. The future is terrifyingly finite. That’s where Children of Men begins.

In a profound and extremely relatable (to me, anyway) performance, Clive Owen plays a man who ambles through life in a scotch-soaked haze, until his ex, now a political revolutionary — played harshly yet heartbreakingly by Julianne Moore — shows up alongside the first pregnant woman anyone has seen in years. It eventually falls to Clive to see this young lady through to safety.

If we use pure cinematic artistry as our criteria for great films, this movie is the total package. It’s amazing, it’s the kind of movie that makes me want to invent adjectives just so I can use them here. My eyes tend to gloss over most science fiction – outside of the robots and aliens, I can rarely relate to it on an emotional level.  Ironically, most science fiction leaves out the science, and keeps recognizable human beings out of the fiction.

Here is one of those fantastic exceptions to the rule. The production design of this movie (by Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland) is intricate, wide-ranging, and entirely believable as a place we all could be in twenty-odd years. The cinematography (by Emmanuel Lubezki) is subtly beautiful, informative, and invisibly brilliant. Every directorial choice (by Alfonso Cuarón) leads you to feel the immediacy, the reality, of the story. And the performances are stunning.

Clive Owen’s character has lived a life of pain, disappointment, and eventual complete detachment; he doesn’t have to raise an eyebrow for you to see that in his face. You believe in his love for Julianne Moore and for Michael Caine, as his best friend, even without particularly extended screen time for either of them, even without anyone directly saying so. This is a story about people as much as it is about ideas.

Children of Men was the best movie of its year, in my opinion.  Clearly one of the bravest and most necessary to be released by a major studio of the past dozen years.

Why? This movie is about nothing less important than the value of human life. It makes you believe in it and care about it. At this moment in history, that makes it more than just a brilliantly-crafted movie; it’s actually valuable.

This movie makes a persuasive case for keeping hope alive, in a decade where hope was in short supply.  And I’d also suggest that the choice of Jarvis Cocker’s “Running The World” as end-credits theme is one of the best matches of song-to-movie that I could possibly name.  The song brings a perfect dose of black humor to warmly cap off a movie that was pretty sparse on the humor front.

The first time I saw Children Of Men theatrically, the movie ended and the credits started rolling and “Running The World” began to play. And then something sweet happened that I thought I was imagining at first: A little kid started dancing in front of the screen, happily doing windmills.

[Note to parents: This is absolutely not the movie to show your children. It is sophisticated, disturbing, upsetting, tragic, and ambiguously uplifting at best.]

But all the same, seeing that child dance around to that particular sardonic and beautiful tune was one of the most bizarrely hopeful images I have seen.

The movie is equally so.

 

(The Koreans did not seem to get the vibe of the movie.)