CHILDREN OF MEN

"As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children's voices."

The definitive movie epic of 2006 has arrived, ladies and gentlemen.

CHILDREN OF MEN is a miraculously great movie, a film that triumphs on every conceivable level and reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place. It touches on every emotion I've ever experienced in a theater; excitement, dread, fear, laughter, emotional connection, romantic bliss, and awe. It didn't just make me scared, it made me clutch my seat. It didn't just make me sad, it made me shed a tear (believe me, I never cry during movies). It didn't just surprise me, it made me jump out of my seat and my jaw drop. It didn't just make me laugh or force a message on me, it made me genuinely happy.


Taking place in 2027 Britain, director Alfonso Cuarón presents a world that is in ruins and is becoming exponentially worse and worse every day. Why, you ask? Women are infertile. Nobody really knows why, but there hasn't been a birth in over eighteen years. The film opens with a boom as the news headlines read that the youngest person in the world, 'Baby Diego', eighteen years and change, has been stabbed. It is in the coffee shop we are introduced to Theo, a world-weary nobody who has been de-sensitized to pretty much everything, who doesn't care about the youngest and most famous person on the planet being murdered, and who skips out of work to get stoned with his hippy friend Jasper. The two are played by Clive Owen and Michael Caine, in mesmerizing performances (although Caine doesn't get much screentime).


Theo is not the only lasting thing the audience gets from the opening scene in the coffee shop. As soon as he walks out, the shop explodes. Not only does it explode, but it does so in one continuous take, from the opening frame of the film to Theo's reaction, spilling his coffee and clutching his ears. This image shakes the audience and gets us into the mindset of the film: intense, to the point, and viscerally amazing. Cuarón moves his camera unlike any other director in any other film I have ever seen. Altman and Scorsese know how to move through a scene, but they have never orchestrated the controlled chaos the obviously gifted Mexican director displays here. One scene, a battle between the British army and a group of insurgents (reflecting the times in Iraq, quite clearly), moves through blocks, with debris falling and exploding, for seven entire minutes, without a single cut. The audience isn't just watching it, they're practically living it.


I've gotten carried away. The story moves quickly, and Theo soon finds himself caught up in a very important assignment. An ex-flame, now considered a terrorist (Julianne Moore) asks him to get fake transit papers for a girl (Claire-Hope Ashitey) named Kee that she needs to have leave the country. The British government is cracking down on illegal immigrants hard though, and the girl is one. Theo's world is turned upside down when it turns out the girl is actually the first mother in almost two decades. Not only is she pregnant, but she is wanted.


Here is where Clive Owen's acting chops are put to the test. He begins as a disheartened, disillusioned man who really doesn't care about anything anymore. What's the point? Everything is going to be gone in fifty years to him. He is thrust into a situation he didn't want to be in and at first tries to opt out of. The essentialness of it dawns on him quickly, and he realizes that this young black woman and her baby are the most important people the world has ever known. The interaction between Theo and Kee is extraordinary and original; there isn't really a romantic bond between them, nor a paternal one, but there is definitely a co-dependency between them.
As the world falls apart around them, Theo and Kee trek onward on their impossible journey to the coast of England. When I say the world is falling apart, I mean it. Trash lines the most public city streets, and violence and chaos engulf the nation. It is never really said whether or not the world has succumbed to nuclear fallout, but an early news commercial reads of how New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Bangladesh, and other major cities have fallen over the world. Meanwhile, Britain 'soldiers on'. Cuarón and his team have crafted the most elaborate future Earth in any movie I have ever seen, with amazing attention to detail. Where most films' dystopian outlooks are dominated by special effects, Cuarón, Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezky, and Production Designer Jim Clay have made and shot a devastatingly real future, corroding on the inside and the outside. It is as well-photographed as any film in the last decade, and the impossibly long shots are extraordinarily authentic. No scene is there for filler, nor are there characters who are out of place or cliché-driven. This is a masterpiece, as haunting as it is beautiful, as bleak as it is ultimately hopeful, and as authentic as it is surreal.

A+