Just saw Children of Men the other night on the telly. A friend brought over the DVD and he, his friend, my wife, and I watched the movie with rapt attention. If you haven't seen it, you really should. It is worth watching for several reasons.
First, the story is good. The theme isn't blindingly new, but it is prescient. More on this later.
Second, the acting is very good. Everyone is believable, and they're easily recognizable. The hero, Theo, is cast in my favorite mold: the little guy who gets caught up in something that he finds very hard to ignore. His sketchy past is revealed through snippets that show him to be someone who used to care very much about the problems of the world, but eventually slipped into the slave-wage rat race world, hoping to disappear and forget.
Many of the extras lend credibility to this, as London is depicted as a very dirty and hopeless place for the majority of the population. There is an eerie parallel to Baghdad. In one scene, Theo visits a relative, Nigel, who lives inside a barricaded section of the city where the elite still cling to their illusions. Nigel has servants, uses his chauffeur to take his Rolls to shuttle Theo about, and sports a huge Picasso in the dining room. It looks like the green zone inside Baghdad.
Third, the cinematography is top-notch. There are at least two scenes -- two very long scenes -- that were taken with one shot. Kubrick toyed with this, Altman used it in A Prairie Home Companion, and Alfonso Cuarón made it work in this film. The long shot itself is commendable, because it takes a lot of coordination between all the people involved. The real beauty of these scenes, however, is the way the camera moves around, seemingly floating around the characters, in and out of cars and buildings, and never once revealed by a shadow or other snafu. Well, at least from what I saw...
The prescience I mentioned earlier is the portrait that is painted of the world.
We see xenophobia, Homeland Security signs, propagandist advertising, the glorification of death, the loss of youth, and the hopelessness that surely follows the acceptance of the end of everything that was once normal and comfortable.
As I remarked during the battle scenes in the prison, it looked a lot like a contemporary war. In fact, it looked like someone's vision of the current situation in Iraq. There was a well-equipped army fighting several zealous factions who either wanted an end to the bloodshed and bigotry, or the beginning of a fruitless civil uprising. It's happening now in Baghdad and Palestine.
The one ray of hope, of course, lay in the world's only baby. Symbolically, the mother and the baby survive the journey out of the madness and take a trip across the water (usu. a metaphor for the subconscious). Their goal is an unseen place called The Human Project.
There are several layers of symbolism, and more than enough to keep just about anyone's mind busy with interpretation. My wife saw newspaper clippings that denounced Bush. The baby has an unknown father. The hero must sacrifice himself so that the child lives. Only women were stricken with the sudden inability to procreate. The baby, just through the act of being seen, was the only thing that stopped the fighting, if only temporarily. The mother was black and the only soldier that crossed himself and genuflected was black.
The list goes on.
Children of Men is the kind of movie that the Wachowski brothers should have made when they came up with the idea for The Matrix. It's smart, real, and a fine example of everything that Hollywood isn't. Alfonso stuttered and coughed with his earlier films (well, at least the english-language ones), but this one is very, very smooth.
First, the story is good. The theme isn't blindingly new, but it is prescient. More on this later.
Second, the acting is very good. Everyone is believable, and they're easily recognizable. The hero, Theo, is cast in my favorite mold: the little guy who gets caught up in something that he finds very hard to ignore. His sketchy past is revealed through snippets that show him to be someone who used to care very much about the problems of the world, but eventually slipped into the slave-wage rat race world, hoping to disappear and forget.
Many of the extras lend credibility to this, as London is depicted as a very dirty and hopeless place for the majority of the population. There is an eerie parallel to Baghdad. In one scene, Theo visits a relative, Nigel, who lives inside a barricaded section of the city where the elite still cling to their illusions. Nigel has servants, uses his chauffeur to take his Rolls to shuttle Theo about, and sports a huge Picasso in the dining room. It looks like the green zone inside Baghdad.
Third, the cinematography is top-notch. There are at least two scenes -- two very long scenes -- that were taken with one shot. Kubrick toyed with this, Altman used it in A Prairie Home Companion, and Alfonso Cuarón made it work in this film. The long shot itself is commendable, because it takes a lot of coordination between all the people involved. The real beauty of these scenes, however, is the way the camera moves around, seemingly floating around the characters, in and out of cars and buildings, and never once revealed by a shadow or other snafu. Well, at least from what I saw...
The prescience I mentioned earlier is the portrait that is painted of the world.
We see xenophobia, Homeland Security signs, propagandist advertising, the glorification of death, the loss of youth, and the hopelessness that surely follows the acceptance of the end of everything that was once normal and comfortable.
As I remarked during the battle scenes in the prison, it looked a lot like a contemporary war. In fact, it looked like someone's vision of the current situation in Iraq. There was a well-equipped army fighting several zealous factions who either wanted an end to the bloodshed and bigotry, or the beginning of a fruitless civil uprising. It's happening now in Baghdad and Palestine.
The one ray of hope, of course, lay in the world's only baby. Symbolically, the mother and the baby survive the journey out of the madness and take a trip across the water (usu. a metaphor for the subconscious). Their goal is an unseen place called The Human Project.
There are several layers of symbolism, and more than enough to keep just about anyone's mind busy with interpretation. My wife saw newspaper clippings that denounced Bush. The baby has an unknown father. The hero must sacrifice himself so that the child lives. Only women were stricken with the sudden inability to procreate. The baby, just through the act of being seen, was the only thing that stopped the fighting, if only temporarily. The mother was black and the only soldier that crossed himself and genuflected was black.
The list goes on.
Children of Men is the kind of movie that the Wachowski brothers should have made when they came up with the idea for The Matrix. It's smart, real, and a fine example of everything that Hollywood isn't. Alfonso stuttered and coughed with his earlier films (well, at least the english-language ones), but this one is very, very smooth.
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