{"id":1633,"date":"2007-04-05T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/04\/children-of-men-redux\/"},"modified":"2013-10-04T11:08:26","modified_gmt":"2013-10-04T18:08:26","slug":"children-of-men-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/04\/children-of-men-redux.html","title":{"rendered":"Children of Men redux"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
Children of Men<\/a><\/i> is on DVD<\/a> now, so Christopher Orr<\/a> at the New Republic<\/i> takes another look at it:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCinema,\u201d Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n told The Seattle Times<\/i> in December, \u201c[has] become now what I call a medium for lazy readers. \u2026 Cinema is a hostage of narrative. And I\u2019m very good at narrative as a hostage of cinema.\u201d He was referring to his film Children of Men<\/i>, and he captured its strengths and weakness admirably. It is a frequently moving, occasionally harrowing tour de force of cinematic technique; yet it is also somehow hollow. It was simultaneously one of last year\u2019s best movies (better, I think, than any of those nominated for Best Picture) and one of its larger disappointments.<\/p>\n

The film, just released on DVD, is an adaptation of the 1993 P.D. James novel The Children of Men<\/i>, and Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s alterations were not limited to trimming the definite article from the title. James\u2019s novel was an explicitly Christian fable about faith and loss, love and solitude, our duties as parents of children and as children of parents. Cuar\u00f3n hewed back these themes aggressively and substituted contemporary political references\u2013to Guant\u00e1namo Bay and Abu Ghraib, to anti-immigrant sentiment in Great Britain and the United States, to firefights on the streets of Iraq. But while Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s changes add resonance to James\u2019s story, they don\u2019t offer meaning. Children of Men<\/i> retains the shape of a parable, but lacks the message. . . .<\/p>\n

The problem is that a world without children is clearly a metaphor, but Cuar\u00f3n doesn\u2019t quite seem to know for what. James is a devout Anglican, and for her the meaning of a world without children is entirely clear: It is a world without God. The creation of new life is, after all, not only the most palpable miracle to which most of us will ever be privy, but a form of afterlife as well (especially for those of us who, unlike James, are skeptical of the literal kind). Children give us hope and purpose that extends beyond our own spans on Earth and the knowledge that, after we\u2019re gone, we will still be judged. For James, a world without God is an abomination.<\/p>\n

For Cuar\u00f3n\u2013who is not, to my knowledge, a religious believer, or at least not one so fervent as James\u2013a world without God looks a lot like, well, the world, perhaps with a few more internment camps dotting the landscape. Much of his film seems disconnected from the central fact of a childless society, which for him serves as little more than an explanation for public lethargy in the face of a repressive police state. At times, there is even explicit tension between Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s purposes and James\u2019s original vision: Ross Douthat, for instance, smartly noted<\/a> that the anti-immigrant fervor Cuar\u00f3n has made a central element of the film makes very little sense in the context of a barren nation: Wouldn\u2019t a tired and aging populace want to import immigrant labor (as it does in James\u2019s novel) to help with society\u2019s menial tasks?<\/p>\n

Cuar\u00f3n is a ferociously gifted filmmaker (among his accomplishments, he\u2019s the only director to have brought anything resembling magic to the Harry Potter<\/a> oeuvre), but he is not a polemicist, and The Children of Men<\/i> is a polemical work. Dispensing with James\u2019s Anglican allegory is fine; but Cuar\u00f3n fails to develop an alternative animating premise that might have given purpose to his narrative. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Children of Men is on DVD now, so Christopher Orr at the New Republic takes another look at it: \u201cCinema,\u201d Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n told The Seattle Times in December, \u201c[has] become now what I call a medium for lazy readers. \u2026 Cinema is a hostage of narrative. And I\u2019m very good at narrative as a hostage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nChildren of Men redux<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Children of Men is on DVD now, so Christopher Orr at the New Republic takes another look at it: "Cinema," Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n told The Seattle Times in\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/04\/children-of-men-redux.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Children of Men redux\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Children of Men is on DVD now, so Christopher Orr at the New Republic takes another look at it: "Cinema," Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n told The Seattle Times in\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/04\/children-of-men-redux.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-04-05T08:10:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2013-10-04T18:08:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_MwnH1kpbPRM\/RhUUmKJl9iI\/AAAAAAAAAEY\/DWVf-P0C2cA\/s400\/childrenofmen2.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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