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<\/a>My review of Children of Men<\/a><\/i> isn\u2019t up yet, but suffice to say it\u2019s mostly positive \u2014 more or less along the lines of the review<\/a> written by my friend Jeffrey Overstreet<\/a>. I do have some qualms about the film, though, and a couple of reviews that appeared on a couple of blogs today press those points especially hard.<\/span><\/p>\n
First, the so-called Luther at the Movies<\/a>:<\/p>\n Going to see a film based on a novel you\u2019ve read and enjoyed is always problematic. . . .<\/p>\n But writer-director Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s film version of P.D. James\u2019 Children of Men<\/i>\u2014which opens this Friday\u2014is in a category all its own: Call it an act of vandalism. The Christian fable, as James herself described her book<\/a>, was originally published in 1992 and was a respite from her crime novels. A work of dystopian forecasting, Children of Men<\/i> was about a time when women could no longer have babies, the world was dying, and Britain was under control of a dictator determined to maintain a semblance of order amid the chaos.<\/p>\n Cuar\u00f3n (Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/i>, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban<\/a><\/i>) uses the core of James\u2019 scenario\u2014a future without children, and therefore without hope\u2014as a mere MacGuffin<\/a>, that Hitchcockian device that in itself is meaningless but serves to move the action forward. Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s Children of Men<\/i> is little more than high-tech agit-prop targeting the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, border policing, and Homeland Security. That it takes place in the England of 2027 is rather beside the point; the world\u2019s desperate and despairing populations are at each other\u2019s throats, and George W\u2019s now decades-old policies are to blame. (I couldn\u2019t help but think, not of Nineteen Eighty-four<\/i>, but of 1984\u2019s abominable 2010<\/a><\/i>, in which the Reagan White House was retroactively blamed for HAL-9000\u2019s breakdown in 2001<\/a><\/i>.) . . .<\/p>\n Throughout the film, characters from the novel are reassigned roles and political positions as Cuar\u00f3n and co-screenwriter Timothy J. Sexton see fit. In fact, the first thing Cuar\u00f3n does when he arrives in the year 2027 is eliminate the Christians. In James\u2019 book, Julian is a beautifully wrought Christian believer: the new Eve, the new Mary, the hope for the salvation of the world. But that<\/i> Julian has been swapped out for Moore\u2019s Julian, now Theo\u2019s ex-wife and a revolutionary any Maoist could love. (As for the book\u2019s Luke, the Christlike Anglican priest\u2014 Cuar\u00f3n has rebirthed him as a duplicitous butcher.) In fact, the only bits of religion left in Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s version are cults of fanatical masochists and a midwife who engages clumsily in Tai Chi and chants the Buddhist<\/a> Om mani padme hum<\/i>. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Then there is Victor Morton<\/a>, who calls the film a \u201cgelded orphan\u201d at his Rightwing Film Geek blog:<\/p>\n What a disappointment.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no doubt that this adaptation of P.D. James\u2019 Christian dystopia is thrilling in pieces \u2026 particularly, the single-take escape as the camera goes into, out of, through and around a fleeing car. But by the time we got to the bravura closing scene (already dubbed \u201cFireman, Save My Child\u201d by some wag), I was in such intellectual rebellion that I had long ago emotionally checked out of the film.<\/p>\n What caused this intellectual rebellion is that Cuaron made the material incoherent by completely secularizing P.D. James\u2019s themes and characters, and decoupling them from what concerned her. He soft-pedals her judgment of the contemporary culture of death in order to make a politically-correct presentist smirkfest against Bush, Guantanamo, immigration, fascist jackboots, etcetera, etcetera, et-bloody-cetera. P.D. James as rewritten by LULAC<\/a>. . . .<\/p>\n Then there are all the ways Cuaron secularizes James\u2019s text \u2014 Julian is no longer a Christian, nor are the Fishes identified as such, Julian no longer carries the miraculous baby, the baby isn\u2019t baptized, a Wiccan midwife is added, there\u2019s no reading of the title Psalm from the CofE Book of Common Prayer, and religion itself is shifted to a \u201cRepent Now\u201d cult glimpsed on the side, like in Stanley Kramer\u2019s ON THE BEACH (which CHILDREN OF MEN resembles in some ways). And maybe worst of all, the wholesale killings of the elderly are re-presented as a voluntary suicide kit. . . .<\/p>\n In short, by short-shrifting James\u2019s religiosity and taking infertility as merely a \u201cpoint of departure\u201d for matters of today, Cuaron makes the situation\u2019s central premise completely incoherent. A non-signifier that drags the film down because it makes no sense, even as a mere Hitchcockian Macguffin. If you want to rant about U.S. treatment of immigrants or terrorists, you don\u2019t need to set it in a world like James\u2019s (nor is it very helpful to do so). I don\u2019t know how any film of CHILDREN OF MEN could have adequately handled or made explicit James\u2019s background concerns. But Cuaron just wasn\u2019t interested, and as a result has made a sci-fi dystopia that doesn\u2019t hold any water.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not as though the immigration material that Cuaron DOES add is even really handled all that well. Because it has nothing to do with infertility, it just feels clunked on top of what would otherwise be just an elaborate chase scene like THE NATIVITY STORY<\/a> or APOCALYPTO<\/a>. It\u2019s just, as Cuaron almost says, a bid to provide a veneer of topicality. I once wrote a piece on LEGALLY BLONDE 2, where I compared that film\u2019s liberalism to product placement<\/a>. That\u2019s exactly the level at which Cuaron deals with practically every topic in the film. We see out the side of our eyes some people in hoods, and the liberal viewers and reviewers solemnly cluck \u201cAbu Ghraib\u201d as if they\u2019d just a sublymonal ad for Sprite. (Those images have nothing whatsoever to do with contemporary immigration, much less the economic logic of a society short of youth and workers. But why let the facts interfere with a good inflammatory smear?) . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And those are just excerpts. I don\u2019t disagree with any of the points quoted here, but I am not sure that I would make these the focus of my review if I were to see the film and write it up again.<\/p>\n Then again, I am still only halfway through the novel<\/a>, which I had not read at all before seeing the film, and already I can see that there were some definite missed opportunities here.<\/p>\n UPDATE: Victor Morton<\/a> comments on Luther\u2019s review.<\/p>\n