"Children of Men" Could Have Been So Much Better
Instead, it’s a prophetic film that doesn't believe its own prophecy.
I haven’t been able to forget Children of Men since I saw it in theaters in 2006. A quick search reveals that the movie lives on in other peoples’ minds as well. As WoC contributor explains in his essay below, the film is memorable because, with every passing year, it looks more and more prophetic.
And yet, Polansky argues, the movie has a fatal flaw: it does not believe its own prophecy. Unlike the novel it is based on, the movie ultimately fails to stick the landing.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
This month, The New York Times released one of those “best films of the century so far”-type lists that periodicals love so much, sourced from 500-plus Hollywood insiders, along with an (actually pretty fun) interactive portal allowing the rest of us to post our own “Top Ten” lists.
One particular film landed at #13 on the main list and made a strong showing among the vox populi as well: 2006’s Children of Men. I was both surprised and unsurprised at this outcome. Unsurprised, because it received a good deal of acclaim upon its release, and it retains a good deal of staying power nearly two decades on. Moreover, its central premise — a childless world facing irreversible demographic decline — has only proven ever more prescient with time, which is rarely the case with dystopian or apocalyptic fiction. Not incidentally, the film is actually set two years from now, and while we are not yet hunting down replicants, nor battling cyborgs, nor eating each other, we are indeed facing plunging fertility worldwide along with the expansion of government-assisted suicide in developed countries.
And yet I remain surprised by both its popular and critical reception, given the fact that the movie doesn’t actually, you know, work.
The reason it doesn’t work is because those who made it crafted a technically impressive film, the meaning of which they didn’t entirely understand. And while its prescience has been noted, much of that prescience is better attributed to the source material — P. D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men — and one can map the flaws of this adaptation by considering the gap between them.
The film takes place in the year 2027, during a mysterious fertility crisis, in which Great Britain is slowly dying. No one has successfully given birth in two decades; the UK has become a totalitarian police state and appears to be undergoing a kind of low-level civil war between government and anti-government forces, much of it centered on an ongoing refugee crisis. Theo Faron, a former activist who has lost all purpose since the death of his son, is contacted by a revolutionary group called “the Fishes” and led by his estranged wife. They need him to use his official contacts to help a young refugee woman pass through the transit checkpoints that have been established around the country. As he discovers, the young woman, named Kee, is pregnant — the only such woman left in their world. Beset by a fascist government that controls all movement on one side and the increasingly sinister revolutionaries on the other, Faron must escort his heavily pregnant charge to a meeting place with a secretive group of scientists dedicated to discovering a cure for human infertility.
Alongside this dramatic backdrop, Children of Men has much to admire. The cast is uniformly excellent: Clive Owen plays the Humphrey Bogart role of world-weary-protagonist-who-discovers-his-conscience about as well as anyone has done it since Bogart himself, and Chiwetel Ejiofor embodies the charismatic-but-also-wild-eyed-and-dangerous-fanatic role that he has pretty much locked down (e.g., Serenity, Doctor Strange). Technically, it is superb. Alfonso Cuarón reveals a flair for directing sequences of graphic action that his previous films (including the charming Y tu mamá también) barely hinted at. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who has had a truly elite run this century, does astonishing work, shifting from naturalistic scenes of pastoral beauty to the staggering continuous action shots for which the film has become justly famous.
Credit must also be given to the film’s refusal to turn its protagonist into an action hero. Theo Faron’s ordinariness only heightens the intensity around the film’s major set pieces and, frankly, more movies should do this. There are some moments that are almost unbearably suspenseful, and the viewer is denied the emotional reprieve of knowing the protagonist is some kind of superhero who will invariably win out.
But the film’s problems are ultimately thematic in ways that no amount of technique can fix. For there is a hole in the film, and the hole is faith. Please don’t think I’m trying to proselytize; I am the wrong guy to do it. But the film dances around it throughout. It’s not that it’s anti-religious, exactly. Ejiofor’s villain, while a fanatic, is a fanatic of the radical, secular variety, familiar to anyone with some knowledge of Cold War-era global politics. And while he recognizes the significance of the new birth, his hope is to use it as a symbol for his (again) revolutionary ends.
Rather, religion and G-d are simply … absent. All of this would be fine in a different film, with a different framing narrative, but the film they elected to make centers on what is unavoidably miraculous. One can see in the film the impression left by its source material (whose author called it “a Christian fable”), like archaeological deposits of a past civilization. What, after all, is the failure to reproduce but a lack of faith in the present and future?
In the film’s version of Theo, he is presented as a former political activist (for what, it’s unclear) who evidently became a bureaucrat following the tragic death of his son. He has in a sense lost his faith, but faith in political projects, not true faith. Even the Christian symbolism of a radical group calling itself “The Fishes” is lost here.
The failure to understand the film they made also undermines the film’s narrative and setting, in which scenes of political violence and downtrodden refugees feature heavily. The primary reason that refugees and other migrants move from one country to another, however is to seek a better life for themselves and their children. By contrast, the primary concern of immigration restrictionists is that such migrants will reduce the quality of life for their children. But without any children, what possible motivation could there be for the dramatic clash of these radical and reactionary energies? By the same token, who would bother going through the trouble of maintaining a totalitarian government?
While the novel does feature violence, as well, it is nihilistic in character rather than a reflection of contemporary right or left ideological movements. Similarly, in the book’s savvier treatment, Britain has abandoned democracy but mostly because it is content to allow a soft authoritarian government to shepherd its people to an orderly and comfortable end. The novel is a truer projection of our own situation for how it more accurately gauges the spiritual health of a society at the cusp of the End of History (a book that was, incidentally, published in the same year as James’ novel). For the society that the novel depicts is much more clearly our own: people who increasingly refuse to reproduce, elderly who go quietly to their government-assisted demise, democracies giving way to managerial authoritarianism. Our general loss of purpose is much the same, even in the absence of any biological catastrophe.
Ironically, in striving for contemporary relevance by incorporating recognizable images of our world (Third World refugees, masked paramilitary forces, etc.), the film ends up indulging too much in post-apocalyptic fantasies. In doing so, it ends up getting lapped by its true subject. And to the extent that the film retains such popular and critical acclaim, I am inclined to think that the audience too has been lapped. One sympathizes with the filmmakers here, as decadence and meaninglessness and anomie are simply less exciting from a cinematic standpoint than violent conflict, but only one of these is a coherent representation of a literally dying world.
In the film’s climactic moment (spoiler alert!), Kee successfully gives birth, and Theo escorts her and her newborn infant through the war zone as the soldiers and revolutionaries cease fighting and gaze on in awe. It is a profoundly moving scene, and I have seen it bring more than one viewer to tears (me, I’m talking about myself here). But the scene’s power relies upon an implicit meaning that it otherwise denies: both the reproduction of one of the foundational images of Christian civilization, and its portrayal of a miracle that it cannot acknowledge as such.
In the film’s final scene, salvation is provided by the arrival of the looked-for research ship out of the Azores — not deus ex machina but doctus ex machina. This, however, reduces the crisis to a kind of technical problem. Human infertility is a material disease requiring a scientific cure. It is an unfortunate predicament, no doubt, but it is not a morally meaningful one in what it represents, and its metaphorical significance is greatly diminished. This society, which is our society, has not lost its meaning; it is just unlucky.
As the critic Alan Jacobs notes in his review of the novel, “when people are faced with the apparent extinction of the human species, the belief in moral and material progress that undergirds such meliorism becomes, to say the least, untenable.” But the hope the film holds out proves in the end to be one of more and better meliorism. The secret scientific research group will succeed where others failed. The appalling ideological violence portrayed in the film thus represents not so much a perversion of theological hopes but a lack of faith in progress. This rather banal conclusion, however, is concealed by the film’s visual excitement. Which paradoxically draws upon the same spiritual symbolism and meaning that it putatively rejects. This is then a bait-and-switch, enticing us with a spiritual and moral promise upon which it is unwilling (and ultimately unable) to deliver. Children of Men is, in other words, a prophetic film that doesn’t believe its own prophecy.
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I was content to simply sit with the religious imagery in a godless film. So content, I haven't even read the book. But for once here's an article I wholly agree with. Your insight on the tension unresolved has taken the scales from my eyes.
Children of Men is one of the only movies I mention when asked what a favorite is. I've seen it twice, and scenes and dialogue from it are easy to recall.
Also, could we get this line into the immigration discourse?
- "The primary reason that refugees and other migrants move from one country to another, however is to seek a better life for themselves and their children. By contrast, the primary concern of immigration restrictionists is that such migrants will reduce the quality of life for their children."
Talk about a clarifying summary of the problem!
I appreciate this reflection and I hope it encourages more people to read the book, which is really incredible. Sometimes I assume if I saw a film I won't get much out of going back to read the source material (sometimes true!) but in this case that would be quite a shame.
Cuarón has stated in interviews that he was inspired by the synopsis of the book and could see the whole story in his head so he intentionally decided not to read the book in order to avoid losing confidence in his vision. His film is much more concerned with immigration and the treatment of refugees, and I think there is a lot to appreciate about it on its own merits. He does capture some aspects of the spiritual malaise that permeates the novel, but I think James's version reaches much deeper into the soul. Her final paragraph is one of the most perfect endings I've ever read, down to the very last word.