Day 342: Thursday Reviews - Children of Men

Going to try a challenge of watching and writing about a film a day for a week, although some days I may only have time to write a handful of words. Today:

CHILDREN OF MEN

Try not to get yourself in a tizz or anything, but I don’t like Children of Men as much as everyone else. I remember it leaving me cold on its release, and a second viewing has it confirmed.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, it’s filled with bravura long takes, exquisitely staged action scenes, beautiful plays of light and shadow - but as a screenplay it is riddled with weaknesses, and thus as a story it is decidedly mediocre.

It labours so inelegantly in the first act to hammer in its central premise - that in its near future the human race has become inexplicably infertile, the youngest person alive is now 18 years old, and, without hope of a future, mankind limps onwards, through habit, down the inexorable path towards despair, chaos, and eventual extinction.

It’s a powerful premise, but one artlessly communicated to us through expositional dialogue, scrawled graffiti, newspaper clippings, television reports - there’s always a goddamned television playing somewhere declaring to us with the most diaphanous narrative veil exactly the information that is pertinent to that scene.

But where a better film would have the confidence to allow us to discover this information organically, and thus make us feel respected - give our intelligence and imagination something to do, bring us alive - here we’re perpetually told rather than shown, front-loaded with the details we wish to find for ourselves.

I’d rather have an opening monologue/text crawl to be honest. At least that’d get the clumsy stuff out of the way in twenty seconds, rather than twenty minutes pretending to be in the film when really it’s saying, “OK, this is what you need to know before we begin.”

So that set me off on the wrong foot. And from there I was looking for issues. A terrorist group kidnap protagonist Theo (Clive Owen) - bag over head, thrust into van - and he comes to in a tiny cell, bright light shining in his face, hooded figures commanding him to not do anything stupid, etc. And a voice behind the figures, hidden in the light: “Hello, Theo.” And, surprise, it’s his ex-wife (“It’s me, it’s Julian”, she says, expositorily), an activist/resistance fighter, wanting to recruit Theo into a scheme, and she’s “sorry for the theatrics, but the police have been a pain in the…”

Uhh, wait. Are the police in this tiny cell here? Were they in the apartment housing the cell when Theo was brought in? The stairwell? The street?

It’s a red herring meant to be exciting for the audience, but it makes no sense within the film’s world. Nor, it transpires, does much of the plot.

It’s one long chase sequence, really, with Theo becoming embroiled - without much agency on his part for like the first hour - in a plan to smuggle a young woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) out of the dystopian future UK and to freedom. And Kee - big reveal - is the miracle the human race needs. She is pregnant.

But the pregnancy, and Kee, must be kept secret - because reasons! - so Theo falls into the role of guardian, ushering Kee through one thrilling set-piece after another, all filmed in continuous wide angle takes, the camera catching the edges of action, important characters hit with bullets but we are away running for our lives and the camera swings back but we can’t see and then forwards again and we’re clambering over a gate and ducking behind a wall and OH SHIT HERE’S ONE OF THE BAD GUYS - he raises a gun, but POW, he’s hit by a soldier as another faction joins the fray and we see our opportunity and leap the wall as bullets fly on either side…

They’re all breathless, and impressive, scenes - Cuarón excels at this - but Theo is a dull character, Kee has no characteristics at all - Michael Caine plays a cliched older mentor role that I found too obvious. Character motivations are often hazy. There are no interesting character arcs. They sort of aim for Theo being an ex-activist fallen to cynicism who has his hope reignited by Kee and her baby, finds something larger than himself to believe in, but they don’t hit the necessary marks, they don’t find the heart of their story.

And nor do they manage the primal immediacy of something like The Road. They could have stripped back character and the trappings of social existence, gone darker, but the (occasionally excellent) bleakness is forever undercut by attempts at brevity, by making Theo into a laissez-faire hero full of quips - like when a kidnapper leans in close to threaten Theo and as way of retort Theo comments that the kidnapper has terrible breath.

There’s too much exposition, too much material for the left-hemisphere, for the film to be a haunting melancholic emotional piece. It wants to be a story reliant on plot. But the plot is just not good enough. And without really discovering its characters, the themes don't have vessels through which they may develop. "If there were no more children then the world would go to shit" is pretty much all the film ultimately manages to eke from its premise.

The climactic battle, and its poignant ending, is stellar stuff, one of its decade’s finest moments of cinema, but what comes before is too stodgy, leaden, clumsy, in every regard except visually.

Children of Men, then, is an exciting ride, but when it comes down to it, just not adult enough.

Day 264: Wednesday Reviews - Roma

Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film, financed by and streaming to Netflix, is a wonder. An ode to women struggling grandly against the quotidian and occasionally tragic, Cuarón mines his childhood growing up in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City in the 1970s to deliver a stunning portrait of Cleo, a Mixteco Mesoamerican housekeeper living in the home of an upper-class white Mexican family, cooking their meals, washing their clothes, mopping up the stains of dog shit daily from their drive.

The pace is leisurely, measured, yet unyielding. A freight train coming on five miles an hour, stopping for nothing. Cuarón frames his characters mostly in mid and long shots, situating them within their environments - including the house, used for filming, across the street from Cuarón’s childhood home, decorated in his family’s own furniture - and these spaces are brought exquisitely to life in stately camera pans and long holds, which, though almost lethargic at times, are tightly controlled, building a sense of inhabited places.

Within this sluggish, ethereal world, filmed in gorgeous monochrome, we gradually get to know Cleo and the family for whom she works. The family, perhaps excepting the mostly absent father, all care for, even love, Cleo, and yet Cuarón doesn’t absolve them of blame for their culpability in her suffering. Cleo may laugh along with the jokes on the small television set the family watch in the evenings, but she must clear plates as she laughs, prepare the teas, continue on with her ceaseless chores. The mother, overall a gentle and thoughtful employer, is not above chastising Cleo when her own problems become too great, using Cleo as an emotional punching bag, taking out her anger at her failing marriage on the encumbered help. 

Cleo is well-treated, but the line between family and employee is clear, if mostly implicit. In a telling scene, the family, with Cleo, visit friends in a holiday retreat. The walls of the villa are decorated with the heads of dead dogs, pets of the owners, stuffed and mounted on the walls. Cleo stands a long time taking in these silent heads, pondering her own existence. Will she one day be mounted in a cabinet so that her family may remember her fondly when her loyal service is complete?

The film unfolds gently, in this manner, even as cracks begin to form, and tragedies surface. The story is set against the backdrop of Mexico’s larger upheaval, centering on the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971, with the violence that has been inexorably brewing in the country eventually, and literally, bursting into the suburban idyll in which the family reside. In this way Cuarón cleverly ties the personal and the political, the familial and the national, making the dual woes of Cleo and the family’s mother feel as inevitable as the greater shifting of the world.

And yet there is grace and strength to be found within the heartache, and even room for those class barriers that separate Cleo to, if not break down, at least strain. Boundaries are never as fixed as we first think, and the lives that Cuarón presents are complicated, ambiguous, and the family members are rich characters, struggling with their own very real concerns.

But the film belongs to Cleo, and is vivified by a powerful, naturalistic performance by first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio, bringing to the role a sense of restrained, stubborn calm and Ivan-Denisovich-like courage in the face of toil.

The image of a jet plane overhead subtly marks the opening, midpoint, and closing of the film, with the character of a martial arts trainer lecturing to a crowd at the midpoint that you should not expect of him miracles like "levitation, or lifting a jet" - his greatest feat is simply being able to balance on one leg with his eyes closed, a skill that the assembled masses attempt, and fail - all with the exception of Cleo, who is watching, unnoticed, from the sidelines.

The meaning is clear. Greatness is often marked, although rarely noted, not by the actions of the powerful and the famous, the high flyers, but by the millions down here on the ground, wrestling with, and enduring, countenancing - transforming - the secret suffering of daily existence. The many who labour on, quietly, at their lot in life. 

Cleo is one such saint. The woman to whom the film is dedicated - Cuarón’s own childhood nanny, “Libo” - is perhaps another.

Roma is an eloquent and essential piece of cinema. I highly recommend it.