Progressive Wednesday

The TGIF Movie Review: Children of Men

May 18th, 2007 by Matt

For the first hour and forty minutes, Children of Men paints a bleak picture of our future. Set in England in the year 2027, the flick shows us a flagitious world where war, industrial smog, random acts of brutality, nation-sponsored suicide kits, and the internment of immigrants all dominate culture. It eerily presents what we could become if we continue to give in to terrorism, if we don’t stop torturing prisoners of war, if we don’t cease criminally spying on one another in the name of freedom, if we continue to lose hope in ourselves. If we stop being our neighbor’s keeper, Children of Men might be exactly what we deservedly get, and the film would become an ugly self-fulfilling prophesy on par with the dystopian novels 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

The film stars Julianne Moore and Clive Owen[1], as Julian Taylor and Theo Faron, respectively, and the story begins with an ending — the death of the youngest person on earth, 18-year-old Baby Diego. They call him “Baby” because for 18 years humanity has been infertile, and the end of our species seems, finally, imminent. We learn that the youngest person is now an 18-year-old woman. Julian ends up contacting Theo in an effort to protect this woman named Kee (played with heartbreaking honesty and strength by newcomer Claire-Hope Ashitey). And why does Julian want to protect Kee so badly? Because, rather inexplicably, she’s pregnant. The hope is that she can be safely transported to a sanctuary at sea where scientists might be able to save our race. Theo is at first resistant, but becomes committed, to the point of self-sacrifice, after tragedy strikes and a conspiracy is revealed.

Two lines of dialogue reduce the film to its heart. The character Jasper Palmer (played by Michael Caine) sees Kee and recites the Sanskrit closing to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”: Shantih, shantih, shantih. This loosely translates to: “The Peace which passeth understanding.” And Miriam, a secondary character who is a former obstetrics nurse, further explains why Earth is so filled with suffering: “As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd what happens in a world without children’s voices.” This line gloriously foreshadows a closing where we see the power of innocence on a planet gone violently bipolar.

So Children of Men is ultimately a film about hope, a hope we can’t fully understand because we can’t clearly see the world awaiting us. We all remain, too often, myopic to what’s wonderful, myopic to what’s wicked.

See for yourself…

[1] After seeing Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, The Hours, and The End of the Affair, I rarely miss a Moore movie. And Clive Owen hooked me after his turns in Closer, Derailed, and Inside Man. I’d highly recommend any of those flicks.