Children of Men

The Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón's new film, Children of Men, has flown mostly under the radar this awards season -- a surprise, given the high profile of Cuarón's previous two projects, the teenage fever dream Y Tu Mamá También and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the most energetic and inventive of all the boy wizard's films. But Universal, Children of Men's studio, seems to have thrown up its hands at the challenges of marketing the film, releasing it to little fanfare or advertising on Christmas Day -- very late in the game, and the precise day of the year that audiences would find Cuarón's bitter vision of the future most difficult to swallow. They've even given the film an absurd tagline ("No children. No future. No hope.") that seems scientifically designed to be as unappealing as possible. Given the overall grimness of Children of Men's conceit, it's easy to see why Universal is making such a hash of it. Given the quality of the film, however, it's a real shame: Children of Men is the best picture of the year. It's also, surprisingly, one of the most hopeful.

Set in 2027, eighteen years after a mysterious blight has robbed the human race of its fertility, Children of Men begins with a series of unnerving jolts delivered its sad-sack hero, Theo Faron (Clive Owen). He manages to make it through the first two -- his London neighborhood is bombed, and he's thrown into a van by armed kidnappers -- mostly unscathed, but it's the third shock that really undoes him: an encounter with his ex-wife Julian. Perhaps Theo could have survived this one too, if only Julian weren't played by Julianne Moore, in a hardened, tricky role as a radical who's a fiercer cousin to the character she's portraying on Broadway in David Hare's The Vertical Hour.

Julian asks Theo for help smuggling a refugee across the border, and because Theo still loves Julian and mourns the child they lost years ago, he agrees to help. Theo and Julian meet the refugee, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), and pack her into a car for a drive through the blighted countryside; Cuarón allows his heroes a moment of banter, a goofy, graceful look at the love Theo and Julian once shared, before the car is attacked and the film launches into an hour of seemingly unceasing, gut-wrenching action.

Clive Owen in Children of Men

In this Britain, shorn of hope by years of infertility, the cities are papered with advertisements for suicide pills and anti-immigrant propaganda. The countryside is a no-man's-land dotted with piles of burning animal corpses under an angry gray sky. Visually, Cuarón's future is stark and striking (the cinematography is by Cuarón's frequent collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki) but not particularly innovative; it owes debts to the designs of Brazil, Minority Report and other sci-fi. But Cuarón and his four co-screenwriters (and P.D. James, who wrote the novel from which the film is adapted) have given great thought to the psychic damage wreaked on a world without children; as the film opens, the nation mourns the death of Baby Diego, the youngest person on Earth, shot and killed at age eighteen. (Londoners lay bouquets in makeshift memorials, just as they do for the People's Princess in this year's other film of Britain in crisis, The Queen.)

Children of Men calls to mind Brian K. Vaughan's comic-book series Y: The Last Man, set in a similarly blighted future -- one in which all men but one have died. In Vaughan's future, women take care to create simulacra of male companionship: masculine women are prized, and one Japanese entrepreneur has made a fortune renting out male animatronic robots. The London of Children of Men has no similar pluck, perhaps because unlike Vaughan's series, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, Children of Men takes place eighteen years after anyone's had a child. Lethargy and fatalism have overtaken most Londoners; why maintain schools, or enjoy great art, or even treat your sewage, if there will never be anyone to follow you on Earth? Why not just pop a suicide pill (a Quietus, in the script's clever branding) and sleep forever?

Just the sound of a baby's cry can bring hardened soldiers to tears in 2027, so you can imagine Theo's shock when he discovers that Kee, the refugee he's helping to smuggle across the border, is eight months pregnant. ("It takes nine months?" Kee touchingly says, a young woman who's never held a baby in her life.) With Julian's radical compatriots after Theo and Kee, and the government after the radicals, the movie is a series of chases, each fraught with peril for not only our heroes but for the fate of humankind. Films that put babies -- born or unborn -- in peril often can feel like the worst kind of exploitation, but in the case of Children of Men Cuarón's humanism leavens such tough material. Such is his control over his film that viewers can trust he will not lead them astray.

As for Cuarón's technical virtuosity, it's nearly unparalleled among modern directors; three sequences in Children of Men rank among the most impressive achievements in contemporary film in seamlessly incorporating subtle effects work to build fluid, single-take shots that feel utterly compelling and convincing. A long battle and chase shot from inside a crowded car has been justly lauded for its technical achievement, but another scene later in the story -- the events of which I can't reveal, for fear of spoiling the film -- is much more low-key but equally astonishing. Cuarón shoots a commonplace event -- one that I've never seen portrayed convincingly in cinema -- in one take in a dark, cruddy refugee shelter, and he nails it.

The heart of the movie is Theo's evolution from broken and defeated to committed and hopeful; this reclamation project is aided by the luminous Kee, whom Ashitey makes likeable and funny, and Jasper, Theo's pot-growing best friend (an engaging Michael Caine), who comes to Theo's spiritual and practical aid in times of crisis. Clive Owen's portrayal of Theo is a subtle but powerful piece of acting; Theo transforms from a man who can barely dredge a response to a terrorist bombing to a man whose face opens up with love in the middle of a war zone.

Clare-Hope Ashitey in Children of Men

As Universal's dismal tagline suggests, a society without children lacks a future. But such is Cuarón's embrace of his characters' humanity that Children of Men winds up positing the inverse: that the prospect of even a single child can raise hope unlimited even in those who had thought themselves lost. For such a grim-faced film, Children of Men has a joyful heart. Alfonso Cuarón, it turns out, believes the children are the future.