The Critics' Children

It appears that I'm in the minority on Children of Men. Yes, it's well crafted--and the battle-zone single shot through the debris-strewn immigrant camp streets is certainly the extended take of the year--but I still maintain that Cuarón's directorial savvy is in service of little other than itself. And even its most ardent boosters don't offer much to counter this. In Slate, Dana Stevens hails it as "the movie of the millennium," and suggests it will top her year's best list. But her praise is almost entirely technical, and she admits that the details of the film's future world are related only "indirectly" and that one at least could argue that "the particulars of the film's political world are too vaguely sketched" (though, to be fair, Stevens sees this as a positive). Manhola Dargis goes a little further, arguing that the film's vague, meandering nature cleanses it of the "hectoring qualities that tend to accompany good intentions in Hollywood." And I'd agree, mostly, but that ignores the fact that Cuarón seems to have no intentions whatsoever.

In the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan makes the best case for the movie by comparing it to Blade Runner. Like that film (one of my all-time favorites), it's a dystopian sci-fi flick that strips its source material of most of its interiority and detailed societal rumination and substitutes more conventionally cinematic material--a noirish detective story in Blade Runner, an episodic chase narrative in Children of Men. If I alter my opinion on the film, it will be in the same spirit that loves Blade Runner, both the novel and the movie, as drastically different as they are.

But I'm not sure that will happen. Blade Runner takes the skeleton of Philip K. Dick's story and world and builds it into both a grand futuristic vision and a rather complex exploration of what makes one human. Children of Men discards most of what makes James' book great and replaces it with a lot of technical flash, but, as far as I can see, not much else. Even Turan gives mostly technical praise, saying only that it "comment[s] on the problems society faces today" without giving us a hint of what, exactly, it has to say about those problems. Perhaps this is because it says nothing.

Perhaps I would've liked Children of Men more had I not read P.D. James' book first. But even trying to think about the movie apart from the source, I still find myself coming to the same conclusion: It's stunningly produced and often gripping in a chaotic sort of way, but ultimately it's hollow, a whole lot of uproar over nothing.