The Billiken's Bluff

Alfonso Cuaròn’s new film Children of Men is conspicuously devoid of explanation. Brought along on the journey of a journalist named Theodore (played by Clive Owen) in a future where the worlds population has become infertile, we come across characters and events so starkly filmed and acutely realized that they refuse to be forgotten, even while their origins and back-stories are so mysterious as to defy comprehension in the ordinary cinematic sense.

In the world of futuristic science fiction movie, your ten dollars usually buys you the quick facts you need to understand the world you have walked into so you can focus on the what next - who is chasing who or what’s exploding or who might get naked. For instance: the world is underwater because we melted the ice caps, or the city is rubble because we built robots that took it over. In Children, the future world has gone to a hell that is every bit as palpable as any of these familiar scenarios. But rather than hand over the all-important why by feeding the audience a prologue or preachy mid-film revelation, Children achieves an unexpected greatness by demanding of the audience that they look for answers in the faces of its characters and find out about the fictional world by considering their own. As with every great story, part of Children of Men is what you bring in with you; you aren’t going to wrap up the story up unless you are willing to do a little bit of the work yourself.

As such, it’s a rare moment for the film when the aging hippie Jasper ( Michael Caine) explains to the miraculously pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) a bit about Theo’s past, revealing that he and his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) once lost their own child. It is a rare moment for two reasons. First, the revelation is rare within the film because the filmgoer is otherwise left as much in the dark about the main characters’ pasts as he is about such larger questions as why the world has suddenly gone infertile in the first place.

Secondly, it is unique choice to have Caine’s work as actor happen entirely out of focus in the distance while the audience is left watching only Theo's face as he hears the story of his own pain. Michael Caine is Michael Caine, after all; as is he is delivering the most important monologue in the film you would normally expect a least a few seconds where you could see his face. But Children doesn’t ask you to remember characters and performances as much as it asks you to remember what it might feel like to be them. Unlike other science fiction films, Owen’s own character isn’t important because he’s the last hope from the future, or the map that will save everyone is tattooed on his back, or because hes the ONE – hes important only because of what his face shows in this one scene: that he is despair in human form, walking barefoot and armed only with a flask of jack.

With the exception of one key scene, we see the rest of the film’s terrifying 2027 landscape through Theo's eyes and are invited to experience it the way he does as he leads humanity’s last hope through it. There is a great deal along the way to comment on: allusions to the nativity story, the interesting use of pets, haunting references to holocaust and Abu Ghraib imagery and war-torn Baghdad streets, the looming “Report Suspicious Activity!" signs of the modern Amercican subways, the ever present immigration issue.

To me, the film feels like the disturbing dream of someone who drifted off while watching the news in 2006 and is forced to revisit these images in a self-invented storyline that wanders through his fears about the world. The fact that Theo inexplicably finds it impossible to keep shoes on his feet throughout the film in particular feels like the kind of problem you might have in a dream – improbable in the real world but unsurprising and vivid as it recurs to the dreamer.

I have my own amateur opinions about many of these details – but you will too, so I won’t bother too much with mine. Interpreting this film – from its unseen beginning to its ambiguous end – will depend on your willingness to address your own questions about humanity. Let it suffice to say that ultimately what you think and feel during the film will be affected by what you think and feel about the world you live in. The only question is whether the same stands true for the reverse.

SIDE NOTE
Amusing to me, both the Got and I were surprised that the other liked the film. I remember the Got had hated Black Hawk Down and I would have thought the combat scenes in this movie provided a similarly unpleasant experience – getting that faint shadow-of-a taste of what it might feel like to get shot at, dialogue through gunfire. The Got, for his part, knows that N-Dot hates it when movies inject politically-charged imagery or material without a defined and important reason.

Sure enough, my eyes were already rolling when I read a review of the movie and saw that the word “Orwellian” was being thrown around. But having walked into a movie that I expected to be an undeservedly praised (provocative!) condemnation of the war on terrorism or western immigration policies, I was surprised to instead find a thoughtful film that conjured up all these charged images and issues with the same vehemence with which it demanded that you set aside what you think about them. Sure, there are enough of the expected totalitarian government clichés lurking in the movie that a reasonable lefty could walk out feeling that this or that policy of Bush or Blair’s got targeted and the dirty facists somehow got their usual cinematic flogging. But the movie admirably goes beyond all this; whatever political points might be under construction here they seem secondary to the greater aim of making the audience think about what it means to be human. In that sense, the movie seems to grasp that whatever one personally believes about the best policies to address the threat of terrorism or immigrant deportation or living in a war zone, the dehumanizing aspects these conditions have in common must first be fully felt and understood.

I guess people often see in movies (like events) what they see or expected to see, and I don’t pretend to be different. Some people, for instance, apparently managed to see the amusing, half-staged Borat movie as a serious piece of journalism documenting the evils of American society (I'm looking at you, A-Wood!). For what its worth, I was snacking on a bag of buttered cynicism when I saw Children, and a couple days later I feel like it was the second best movie I’ve seen in a while – frustrating and disturbing, but makes you think. I did not enjoy Children of Men, and I highly recommend seeing it. But get at me if I’m wrong about all this.