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HUMANKIND’S LAST GREAT HOPE: A young woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey), who is the only female to conceive in a future infertile world, may be a modern Mary. This Saturn Award winner (Best Science Fiction Film) combines the insistence on the need for old-fashioned hope and faith found in Metropolis with ultra-contemporary commentary on restrictive immigration laws. Courtesy: Strike Entertainment/Hit & Run/Universal.
CREDITS
Universal Pictures/Strike Entertainment/Hit & Run Productions; Alfonso Cuarón, dir.; P. D. James, novel; Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, scr., Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Hilary Shor, Iain Smith, Tony Smith, pro.; John Tavener, mus.; Emmanuel Lubezki, cin.; Cuarón, Alex Rodríguez, ed.; Jim Clay, Geoffrey Kirkland, prod. design; Gary Freeman, Malcolm Middleton, art dir.; Jany Temime, costumes; Victoria Bancroft, prosthetics; Shaune Harrison, special makeup effects; Richard Beggs, sound design; Ian Corbould, Paul Corbould, F/X; Nick Dudman, animatronics; Rupert Porter/Double Negative, Lucy Killick, Frazer Churchill, Antony Bluff, Amy Beresford/Framestore, visual effects; Andy Kind/Framestore, CGI effects; 109 min.; Color; 1.85:1.
CAST
Clive Owen (Theo Faron); Julianne Moore (Julian); Michael Caine (Jasper); Clare-Hope Ashitey (Kee); Chiwetel Ejiofor (Luke); Charlie Hunnam (Patric); Danny Huston (Nigel); Maria McErlane (Shirley); Michael Haughey (Mr. Griffiths); Phaldut Sharma (Ian); Philippa Urquhart (Janice); Tehmina Sunny (Zara); Pam Ferris (Miriam); Ed Westwick (Alex).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
It’s a miracle.
LUKE, SPEAKING OF KEE’S PREGNANCY
BACKGROUND
The films of Alfonso Cuarón Orozco (1961–) run the gamut from updated old-fashioned family movies (A Little Princess, 1995) to studies of culture and ethnicity in his homeland, Mexico (Y tu mamá también, 2001). A true auteur—director, writer, producer, editor—Cuarón perceives no distinction between a project designed with great commercial potential (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004) and one projecting a dark dystopian vision of a future marked by infertility, as is the case with Children of Men, so long as story elements allow him to convey his personal truth to the largest number of viewers. A former philosophy student and the son of a nuclear physicist, Cuarón’s work conveys serious concerns about science and its potential to destroy the very world it was created to enhance.
A 1992 novel by Phyllis Dorothy (P. D.) James (1920–), who balances her time between serving as a life peer in England’s House of Lords and writing smart fiction, mostly of the detective genre, caught Cuarón’s artistic attention. A lifelong fan of high-quality contemporary literature, he was particularly attracted to this unique turn on traditional dystopian fiction.
THE PLOT
Civil servant Theo, wandering listlessly through the ruined world around him, is kidnapped by a secret society. The dissident Fishes include his onetime wife Julian, who implores Theo to oversee a clandestine operation. A young woman, Kee, must be spirited across the country, to the seaside where a ship from the Human Project awaits. Once drawn into the plot, Theo grasps that Kee is pregnant, a rarity as no child has been born for the past eighteen years.
THE FILM
In the novel, it is Julian who is pregnant. Cuarón added the character of Kee to present a woman of color as a potential Mary, mother of the Son of Man. This allowed not only for sensitivity to ethnicity but also an opportunity, via her harassment as a foreigner by British agents, to comment on illegal immigration, a pressing issue at the time of production. In the book, the child is a boy. By making the baby (an apparent savior) a girl, Cuarón was also able to touch on feminist issues.
Searching for a style that would be appropriate to both the narrative and his viewpoint, Cuarón brought the concept of near-future closer to our own time than had ever before been the case in film. Though set in 2027, the onscreen world reveals no attempt at futurization. This is the filmmaker’s—and the filmgoer’s—own world, driving the social commentary home with added power. For realism, Cuarón opted for a handheld camera, allowing his work to resemble a TV news program. To balance this with the necessary stylization, he drained the spectrum of everyday colors, allowing for an unpleasant industrial blue to dominate the proceedings, an approach that would heavily influence twenty-first-century sci-fi films.
THEME
Cuarón’s main concern, in his words, was to express “hope and faith” in even the most tarnished of life situations, highlighting the need for people to believe still in the old cliché that insists that the darkest hour is always just before dawn.
In James’s novel, Theo is an Oxford don. Cuarón altered this to make him a common man hero, more in line with the director’s desire to reach ordinary people everywhere. James’s telling focused more on the political repercussions of the plummeting birthrate: a fascistic dictator seizing control after an increasingly pessimistic public turns its collective back on the democratic process. In the novel, Julian is not the estranged wife of Theo, but married to one of the anti-government radicals. Cuarón replaced these plot points with images of rage in the street, hand-to-hand combat mirroring political upheavals taking place around the globe in our own time, while neatly employing his musical score to imply a religious allegory.
In the novel, male infertility is revealed to be the source of the birthrate problem. Such a premise can be traced back to the 1956 sci-fi film World Without End (Edward Bernds). Cuarón reverses that, the majority of women no longer able to become mothers. He leaves the question of a cause—for example, pollution of the environment or exposure to nuclear radiation—ambiguous to suggest that the end of humankind, if that does indeed occur, is not due to any one of society’s failings but to all of them. Counterpointing this is the possibility of Divine Intervention, a suggestion that qualifies Children as a conservative film. The Order of the Fish, a term applied to true believers of more than two thousand years ago, is reapplied to those dedicated to the film’s special child. Here, if not in the book, the golden child may be the result of virgin birth, suggested throughout yet never insisted upon, allowing those who wish to accept the film as a new New Testament.
TRIVIA
As grim and post-modern as this film may be, Children of Men contains a sly reference to the glamorous, romantic classic Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942): each movie begins when an antihero is approached by a beautiful lover from his past, requesting that he use his influence to arrange for letters of transit out of the country.
As a youth, Cuarón was forced to drop out of a Mexican film school owing to his desire to shoot in English and otherwise commercialize his projects. As compared to his mentors, the aspiring filmmaker believed that in so doing, he would not compromise his vision but rather expand the potential audience.