Zachary FenellChildren of Men
January 21st 2009 16:45
Children of Men, 2006
I was saving this one for a rainy day. I've seen in a few times, and I'll see it a few times more, but it's definitely not a light-hearted happy-go-lucky movie: this is a movie you want to see to be confronted with the seedy ugliness of the human race and still end with a ray of hope.
Clive Owens plays Theo, an allegedly ex domestic terrorist (the "ex" part being the question in my mind) in the UK, who is charged by his ex-wife to protect the life of a particular girl. Theo and his former squeeze lost their son to a flu pandemic years before, which is a double-triple tragedy since no one has been born on earth since mid-2009.
You really don't understand what it means to have "no children anywhere" until you really see No. Children. Anywhere. It's an eerie thing, an uneasiness that is difficult to place, like trying to remember if you left the iron on at home except that you're really not sure that you own an iron - or that nightmare where you're overwhelmed with guilt over some horrific crime you committed, only you can't remember exactly what happened, why it happened, where it happened, or even where you hid the body.
There are numerous weird little additions in the scenes: there are animals in every scene; Theo never actually gets to finish a cigarette; oranges denote impending danger. The subtleties make the whole experience immersive to the point where you feel the loss of life, you see how the world has become a darker dystopian nightmare than even our most pessimistic pundits and doomsayers dare utter - and we can see how it could really happen in reality.
Why do people make movies like this? Why did P.D. James write such a depressing book? The answer is that it's not depressing, it's not meant to be, even with state-approved suicide sold on every shelf and terrorist attacks as common as popping over to the street corner for a cup of coffee - sure, take the afternoon off, sort it out, we've all been there.
The real up-shot is that it's about hope. It's about envisioning the worst scenario possible and then realizing that there is always a way out, there is always a light, even if it takes 18 years to get there. We do not find out at the end of the movie if the events denote a new beginning for humanity or if it's a just a fluke of nature, but we really don't care. We find in that one tiny miracle, that one shining second of pause, that we are inspired here, in our real lives on this side of the screen, to appreciate what we have, but not in the cloying sickly Christmas-movie kind of way: We now can appreciate life in the visceral and the unwashed as well as the clean and pure.
It is not a perfect movie, but it comes close. 4.5 stars - take motion-sickness pills for the siege scene, seriously.
4.5 Stars
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