Category: Blog Post

Children of Men, 2006. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, written by Cuaron and Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby. The incredible camera work is courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki. Starring Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Pam Ferris, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ojiofor, Michael Caine, Charlie Hunnam, Danny Huston, and Peter Mullan.

Now showing in theaters around town.

There is a now-famous scene in Children of Men, as a car filled with five people is attacked from all sides by a group of rampaging maniacs, intent on killing them. The shot is unbroken by editing, the camera literally spinning inside the car for nearly seven minutes, the audience as confused and terrified as the characters. As the scene reaches its violent crescendo, we cannot help but feel as overwhelmed as the characters; as its quiet and simply shot denouement leaves everyone stunned, both onscreen and in the silver, we are finally allowed a moment catch our breath. Notice then, that sublime and almost, in my mind, holy realization that you are witnessing a moment of pure cinematic glory.

If you were to call yourself a movie buff, a cinephile, someone whose personality takes part of its definition from the simple love of the moving picture, then you have had, at some point in your life, a moment where watching an incredible film takes on special meaning. Like any great event, you can recall with absolute precision where you were and what the day was like. That movie–whatever it is–ranks up there with a first meeting, a national tragedy, a religious moment in its impact. You are forever moved.

Children of Men is just such a movie. Reading the above (and such praise as “The Movie of the Millennium!“) may have already cured you of having this moment–for me, it’s important to be surprised by what you see, and not to go in believing the thing is a classic. But Children of Men is bleak and yet fraught with hope. It is violent and impossibly beautiful. It terrifies in moments and then, in the next breath, eases you into a sense of reflective calm. Children of Men celebrates life, friendships, and damns our crazy society without beating you over the head with a simplistic message.

Children of Men is a masterpiece. If there is a better picture in 2007, then this will go down as one of the great years in movie history.

Children of Men opens in 2027, in London, a grim and lousy world of grays and pollution and government crackdown. We begin in a beat up cafe, where the dour crowd stares up at a TV set to receive yet more bad news, that the youngest person on earth was killed in a bar brawl. “The youngest person on the planet was eighteen years, four months, twenty days, sixteen hours, and eight minutes old,” the BBC drones to a wide-eyed crowd. Theo Faron is but one of these people, pushing through the stunned to get his day’s cup of coffee. Clive Owen plays Theodore Faron with a look of permanent depression. He’s a disgruntled office worker and onetime radical, whose fighting instincts have been reduced to figuring out how to sneak liquor past the guards at work.

For those of us who haven’t gone in knowing the plot, it unfolds patiently, in the dialogue and in the background of this filthy world. There is an international infertility epidemic, and there have been no children born for eighteen years. Society is falling apart. Everyone with an agenda has his or her own terrorist group, the borders of Britain are closed tight, immigrants are rounded up into camps, and the government has the world in lockdown. Billboards advertise Quietus, a suicide kit, and remind women that fertility tests are mandatory. “The world is falling apart, but Britain soldiers on,” the tv blares proudly, but you look around at the piles of garbage, the immigrants in temporary jails on the street, the smoggy air and the sense of impending doom and it seems that a good dose of Quietus might just be the ticket.

Theo is not distraught over the death of Baby Diego, but he is a bit shook up about the blast in the cafe that nearly gave him a terrorist sponsored death. Clive Owen is weary, just waiting to die, but he’s also cool, a reluctant hero in the great tradition of the old Humphrey Bogart films. He’s not really a tough guy, but someone who won’t take shit when it hits the proverbial fan. Like most people, the lack of children has made him into a man just biding time, trying to get the most out of life from a bottle. After the blast, he skips work and hightails it to the home of a pal of his, Jasper Palmer, played with great aplomb by Michael Caine. Jasper is an aging hippie, a political cartoonist who’s retreated to his pot-filled home in the middle of the woods, hidden from the government. This is a haven in which he and Theo can go to drink, get stoned, blast the Beatles, tell jokes, and try to make sense of this fucking world.

Amazingly, this fucking world comes at us in the periphery. Cuaron assumes that we have brains, and that those brains are capable of both gathering information and responding to what we get. There is little backstory, and no explanation whatsoever of the infertility, allowing viewers to conjure up their own horrors. It is not important to know exactly why or how the government ended up growing into a totalitarian state, or what demands terrorist cells like the Fishes want to see implemented. Like everything else in this splendid flick, Cuaron assumes only that we are smart and can follow his lead. There are some striking images that remind us of the fate of this society, most notably graffiti-riddled and abandoned kindergartens, no doubt stripped of any personality by people looking to hold onto any memento of a child-filled past.

Theo ends up getting kidnapped by this ragtag terrorist group called The Fishes. Here, he runs into his old flame Julian, played by Julianne Moore. She is the leader of the group, and needs his help: traveling papers for a young immigrant girl the Fishes need to move to the coast, so that she can board a boat. Reluctantly, Theo agrees, asking a powerful cousin for the papers, with the caveat that the papers demand that he must accompany the girl in question.

The girl, Kee, is in the worst sort of trouble. She’s an immigrant and a former prostitute. And she’s pregnant with the only baby in the world. All hell will break loose around her. The chase is on.

At its heart, Children of Men is a chase film, and in that respect it is a supreme entertainment. It is also a perfect example of a movie that seeks to take the novel upon which it is based and use it merely as a leaping point into creating its own story. Cuaron is interested in using whatever technique is at his disposal–in three cases, with an extended take–not to show off, but to reach out from the screen and engage his audience. But he has not abandoned directing his people in the pursuit of dazzling effects. The performances, from the star to the smallest of roles, are filled with fascinating people, each one shaping their characters carefully, their motivations and temptations much like our own. The antagonists are evildoers, but are understandable, their needs real. No one dies without some semblance of dignity, without our tasting the loss.

At the film’s center is, of course, a baby. Unbelievably, Cuaron does not exploit the presence of this little creature. Unbelievably, because I can only imagine what Spielberg would have done with this–everyone would be googy-eyed over the bairn, and it would have been saccharine of the worst order.

Children of Men is a perfectly realized dystopia. It is about the future, the past, and especially the present. Babies have stopped being born, and for all we know, they could have just decided not to be born in this horrible world of ours. People dress the same, they drive similar cars, they love and hate the same, even, save for the oppressive fact that life as they know it will end in fifty-odd years. And yet, in spite of the wreckage we see, in spite of the violence and the sad fate of most everyone we care about onscreen–or, perhaps, because of all this–Children of Men is the most hopeful film in years. Like holding a baby, it is about the future, it is about the sweet living, squirming present, and it is a solace from the aching troubles of the world.

Die Buchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), 1929. Directed by G. W. Pabst, written by Pabst, Joseph Fleisler, Ladislaus Vajda and Frank Wedekind. Starring (and how!) Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz, Krafft-Raschig, Alice Roberts and Gustav Diessl.

Now available in a handsome DVD from The Criterion Collection.

She was a girl from Cherryvale, Kansas, that Louise Brooks. Beautiful, just beautiful. Look at her face: that’s a look that spans the ages, my friend. Girls from the 20s, girls from the 40s, girls from the 60s, 70s, 80s… well, they lose their lustre over the years. Some look plain silly. Not Brooks. Famous for that shiny black hair, but it was her smile, that smile that just melts your heart. Innocent, really innocent. I guess in real life, she was a joy, a headstrong, opinionated joy. So many men and women hated her, but those who adored her, well… My God, I’d say she was an angel, but, the way she lived, fire and sex. Maybe she was a devil. If she’s the devil I’ll take hell.

I first saw Pandora’s Box at some sort of college get together. I was mopping floors. This is what I did to keep the pen alive, I used to say. Janitor at night, tried to write in the day. Best work I was able to land were some lousy football stories about distant high school heroes. Worthless stuff, absolutely worthless.

I thought I was just a normal guy, you know? A man with dreams, a bit cultured, maybe, someone who could see and appreciate good movies and plays and music. Definitely not an obsessive. In fact, I used to laugh about those movie buffs and comic book nerds, anyone that had a passion that turned them into glassy-eyed, Dorito-eating munchkins. They used to have this University film club, and those fellows would come out of their parent’s basements to go all starry eyed over Woman in the Dunes or one of those dull Bergman epics.

One evening, they decided to show Pandora’s Box. I’ll never forget seeing the poster, and thinking, hmmm, she’s cute. I just figured it was something along the line of Cabaret, some weird movie from the 70s trying to replicate the past, make some statement about Vietnam or Watergate.

The movie begins, with some scratchy LP providing the music. I decided to take a break from waxing the halls, and I check into this seat. Figure I’ll take a nap. I’d been working my tail off, driving three hours to see one football team beat up another, coming home, writing my article for the shithole paper up north, then heading to the campus where I had the distinct pleasure to clean the floors of the learned. I settled in my seat to take a nap, thinking that when something big and bright goes on the screen, I’ll wake up, finish the job. That’s when I saw her.

My Lord, it starts right away. There she is, in that white dress, and that hair, that beautiful hair. She’s got a bottle tucked under her arm. Gin or something. There’s an old man there, with a big, silly moustache. He’s the meter reader, and she’s giving him some looks. And here’s the thing those foolish kids didn’t see: the girl wasn’t some harlot, some black widow luring poor men to their doom, no, my God, no. She was pure, in the sense that what she wanted was love. She would stare at these men, as if to acknowledge some kind of holiness in them, and then she would smile and just break your heart.

All this, in the first few minutes! I couldn’t stop watching. Lulu, as Brooks is called, is having a stormy relationship with this respected publisher, who’s got her cooped up like a bird in this apartment. Lulu is also followed around by this hideous old man, who pimped her as a child, who probably fucked the poor dear, who she, at one point, refers to as her father. There’s this brute of a man who follows the old man around, hoping to score something off Lulu. And then there’s the publisher’s handsome son, who loves her, and his friend, a woman, who is in love with this vision as well–she was, Louise liked to say, the first on-screen lesbian. Everyone wants to possess poor Lulu! And like a girl traipsing through the garden of Eden, she doesn’t see anything wrong with loving everyone.

Physical love, but it was still love. No matter how ugly the man–and some of those boys are ugly monkeys, wretched creatures, fiends of the gutter who just wanted to touch the heaven of Louise Brooks–she wanted to love them. To dance, to swoon, to be held.

That’s why I thought she was an angel.

There’s a murder in the movie. Louise holding a gun like it’s everything rotten in the world, and that’s true–guns are the antithesis of what she is, of love. She goes on the run with the son of the publisher, the son of the man she killed. Lulu is convicted, and then the men in the courtroom, locking arms, surround the girl and hasten her escape. In this city, in this courtroom, these men, beaten, ugly, full of tobacco and cheap liquor, well, for once in their miserable lives, they’re going to get near something beautiful, something angelic. And they help her flee.

But Lulu will not see a happy end. No, I’m wrong: she will finally fall in love, with Jack the Ripper of all people, dying at his hand. So perhaps she did find what she was looking for.

When I stumbled out of the auditorium, I was stunned, just stunned. I hated those students and film buffs then, talking, talking, talking, or laughing. I wanted to beat them over the head with my mop, tell them to be quiet. Upstairs, I worked in the blessed silence, with the lights off, only the warm glow of the exit signs to see if I was really even cleaning the damn floors. But it left me to my thoughts–of the girl from Cherryvale.

There was very little on video and DVD back then. Not much now. Amazingly, I bought an old projector, just to see if I could find some more pictures of hers. I made a trip to Rochester, New York, where she used to live, to the Eastman House, where many of her films are shown. It’s funny, you know, I’ve sort of lost my ability to write the garbage I used to write, so now all I can do is grunt labor. I flex my skills as an unpaid scribe on Louise Brooks sites, fan newsletters, etc. I consider myself the best of that lot, though that’s not saying much.

You’d probably say that I am a wreck. Look at me, though, I keep myself groomed, fit, and I do reckless things, because Louise would have liked that. I jump off railroad bridges into rivers, run shirtless in the winter, that sort of stuff, healthy, manly, I guess. She liked bold, confident men. But she never let them use her–she ran from Hollywood! Later, she became a writer. A girl who loved her solitude. Who loved to smile. Who loved to… well, to put it poetically, to love and be loved.

Men behave badly around her because it is her shining light that illuminates our depravity.

I try to keep a grip on this. I get out, go on dates, and no, I don’t think of Louise Brooks while I’m making love to another woman. You can’t make any money being an expert on her, and that’s not how I’d describe this feeling, this need to learn more about this lovely woman.

I take that back. I am not an expert, for who can really plumb those depths? No, I’m an admirer, a student, a gazer at the heaven of Louise Brooks. I know that I will never quite understand her.

Sometimes, in the late evenings, I wonder if I haven’t gone crazy. But then, I’m not hurting anyone. And I think of that smile, the back of her neck, her way of acting that seems to haunt every actress through history (look for it!), and I smile and am feeling good again. Louise did exactly what she wanted to in her life, from loving cheap stunt men who stabbed her in the back to ignoring the piles of money the big studios promised her. Just to dance, to keep her pride, to be in love.

She is beautiful. If there’s a heaven that is at all honest, she will be an angel. Again, that might be hell. I’m not certain.