The Best Movie This Year

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 2006)

Children of Men constantly tugs at your mind while you watch, pushing your understanding of today by reflecting it in a grim and hopeless tomorrow.
The movie works on a number of different levels. Obviously, there is the intellectual attraction in a good examination of a possible future. How we got to where we are is never bluntly explained, but slowly slipped over to you in newspaper clippings taped blotting out windows in the background of an interrogation cell or mentioned in passing in a news broadcast. This subtle exposition leaves sparks as many new questions as it answers, and leaves your mind thirsting for more context and a second viewing.
The actors give wonderful performances. Clive Owen is reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart as the worn-down hero pressed by circumstance into an unsought role of protector of humanity's hopes. This is a protagonist who weeps at the death of friends by cowering behind a tree as the shock of the horror he has witnessed (and perpetrated) overcomes him. Julianne Moore provides a textured reading as the leader of an extremist group, clear-eyed but boiling with barely suppressed rage. Michael Caine is a joy to behold as a twinkle-eyed satirical pothead living off the grid while caring for his wife who had been tortured into catatonia by the police.
The supporting performances are similarly strong. I was particularly affected by Pam Ferris as Meriam. Introduced as a caregiver to the pregnant Kee, she grows and expands throughout the film, hearkening back to the quiet tragedy as women stopped conceiving children years before.
But it was the visual impact of director Alfonso Cuaron and his team who lift this film from good to great. The set design perfectly captures a believable future of no hope: technological improvement at the margins while the dirt and grime only gets worse. The opening scene is filmed in one shot, ending with a devastating shock. But two set pieces stand out far above the rest. A stunning action sequence moves around and outside and back inside a car under attack from a gang of marauders, featuring motorcycle crashes, shootouts, and a complete shift in mood from buoyant playfulness to intense fear and then to despair without a single seam. The camera trickery could come across as showy, but it instead sharply enhances the storytelling by bringing the audience inside sequence.
The tour-de-force of the film is a shockingly long 8-minute single shot that begins with Clive Owen's Theo pushing a woman in a wheelchair through a crowd and proceeds through an ambush, series of gun fights, into a bus loading with refugees, a tank attack on an apartment complex seized by heavily armed rebels, a trip into the building and up several flights of stairs, a lengthy exchange of dialog and finally the incredible exit of Theo, the new mother Kee and the first child born on earth in almost two decades through the lines of soldiers, rebels and cowering civilians out of the building and to a waiting boat. The gritty realism of the scene, combined with touches like blood splattering the lens, lend it a documentary quality that greatly increases the power of the film. This is virtuoso film-making that does not overpower the story but instead powers the story to higher intensity.
Finally, the film is a powerful political comment on our own times. The refugees crying for help as they stand in cages like animals continue throughout the film and are strongly reminiscent of fascist-occupations in the Second World War. The arrival at a refugee camp evokes images of concentration camps and Abu Gharib, Guantanemo Bay and the gulags. The sharp juxtaposition of images leaves the viewer haunted by the knowledge that this evil is being perpetrated on people right now, by our own government. This is not science fiction, so much as exposure of the costs to liberty suffered in the war on terror. Like the best artists under the soviets or the mullahs of Iran, Cuaron attacks the powerful through carefully veiled fiction.
I can hardly wait to see it again.