Hinting at Hope

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Warning: This article contains major plot spoilers

The whole world seems to be in meltdown in the year 2027. Around the globe are fierce conflicts and violent uprisings. Britain alone has been holding on to some semblance of civilisation, but now it, too, is on the brink of collapse. So many refugees (‘fugees’) have come to the UK that it is being destabilised. National borders have been closed; movement within the country is severely curtailed; and the fugees are being rounded up into vast detention centres. The almost inevitable responses to all this are terrorism and religious extremism.

This is the setting for Alfonso Cuarón’s very loose adaptation of P.D. James’s 1992 novel Children of Men. In fact, much of this background is Cuarón’s invention, not James’s. The world of the novel is dystopian enough, but Cuarón wanted the story to be set in a context which amplified trends within the world of today. Terrorism and immigration – and the link between the two which is sometimes present – are rarely out of the news in Britain and many other western countries. Cuarón throws in unsubtle hints of the war against terror, the conflict in Iraq and Guantanamo. At one point the central characters arrive at one of the detention centres (the whole of Bexley-on-Sea); in the background we see people in cages in poses strongly reminiscent of images from Abu Ghraib. None of this is developed or even examined by Cuarón. And since none of it is in the original, there is perhaps no room to. However, it results in a film which merely toys with emotive and enormously important issues, using them as nothing more than a terrifying backdrop. But it is an all-too-believable backdrop; I can not think of any recent film which presents a more plausible dystopian future.

The story centres on Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a former activist who is now a jaded, alcoholic civil servant. His former lover Julian (Julianne Moore), having continued as an activist, is now the leader of a group called the Fishes. She persuades Theo to help them take a young woman from London to the south coast. After their car is ambushed, Theo and the young woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), along with Fish members Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Miriam (Pam Ferris), take refuge in a safe house. While they are there, Kee makes an extraordinary revelation to Theo: she is pregnant. What makes this extraordinary is that no children have been born anywhere in the world for more than eighteen years. Theo also discovers that the Fishes are more concerned about using the baby as a political pawn than about the safety of the baby or its mother.

Cuarón has changed more than the setting of the story. In James’s novel, it is Julian who is pregnant rather than Kee (she is not in the book), and she is not Theo’s ex-lover. James’s Luke is a clergyman rather than a terrorist, but Jasper is a far less benign character than in the film. The biggest change Cuarón made was to remove most of the Christian elements of the original. James is a Christian and her worldview pervades all her work. She describes her novel – the title of which comes from Psalm 90 in the version found in Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1662) – as a Christian fable. Cuarón’s emaciated narrative functions more as myth and makes no reference to the source of the title. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, he says, ‘The P.D. James book is almost like a look at Christianity, and that wasn’t my interest. I didn’t want to shy away from the spiritual archetypes but I wasn’t interested in dealing with Dogma.’

The explicitly religious elements that are included are few and trivial. Religious extremists are seen in the background; Miriam spouts a nonsense mixture of Christianity, Buddhism and new age ideas. At one point, Jasper explains Theo’s story to Miriam and Kee saying, ‘Everything is a mythical cosmic battle between faith and chance. . . . Theo’s faith lost out to chance. So, why bother if life’s going to make its own choices?’ But this reference to Theo’s faith is to his commitment to a political cause; it isn’t spirituality.

The one strand that retains its Christian connection in an understated way is the journey of Kee and Theo. One is the expectant mother of a ‘miracle’ baby, the other a father figure and protector who is not the baby’s father. They make a dangerous journey to a town of displaced persons where the baby is born in surroundings of poverty. After the birth, they must flee for their lives. There is a powerful and profoundly moving echo here of the birth of Jesus. The most moving moment of the film comes as Theo attempts to help Kee and the baby escape from a bullet-torn building: the fighting ceases and everybody stands and stares with wonder. Tough soldiers are moved to tears at sight of the tiny bundle of life which shows that the world does have a future after all. But even with this echo of the nativity, Cuarón strips away some of the connections. Kee jokes to Theo at one point that she is still a virgin, but then admits that she has had many lovers and doesn’t know who the father is. The pregnancy is still a miracle in that it has come out of the blue after eighteen years, but it’s not on the same scale as the virgin birth. And Kee’s baby represents salvation rather than being the saviour; in Cuarón’s story salvation comes from the mysterious Human Project with their hospital ship, the Tomorrow.

Cuarón’s film has divided critics. Some have been angered by his reworking of the story because, by emptying it of the Christian elements, the heart of the story has gone. Mark Steyn, for example, writes:

There are zillions of bad movies, but Alfonso Cuarón's film Children Of Men is bad in an almost awe-inspiring way. They should teach it in film school as the acme of adaptation. Mr. Cuarón's previous films . . . were perfectly fine, and certainly different directors will approach the same property in entirely different ways. But, with Children Of Men, he's managed to spend a ton of time and money, hire a fine cast, lavish inordinate care and attention to detail on the film's design and cinematography – and yet completely miss the point of the book.

It’s no surprise Cuarón missed the point when, as he admits, he hadn’t read the book – his final screenplay was based on the work of four other screenwriters. Anthony Sacramone calls the film an ‘act of vandalism’ and laments, ‘What’s insufferable is his pressing into service someone else’s vision as a commercial vehicle for a personal political screed.’

Others, particularly those who were not already familiar with P.D. James’s original novel, have been very enthusiastic. Jonathan Ross described it on Film 2006 as ‘one of the most outstanding films I’ve seen in years.’ Rich Cline comments

There's so much to enjoy about this film that we don't want it to end. It's a feast for the eye and the mind. It's packed with harrowing story twists and shocking revelations that provoke us to really think about the issues involved . . . And all of this combines into a film that's about as satisfyingly entertaining as movies get.

Cuarón defends his approach, arguing that film-makers too often make the story explain everything rather than hinting at questions, themes and meanings, and will make them think. He says,

The principle of cinema is that you are looking at that screen. A lot of reviewers nowadays, they fall into that vice: they want stories. They want explanations, they want exposition and they want political postures. Why does cinema have to be a medium for making political statements as opposed to presenting facts, presenting elements and then you making your own conclusions – even if they are elusive? There's nothing more beautiful than elusiveness in cinema.

This is, indeed, frequently one of the marks of great cinema. Film, by its nature as a photographic medium, easily becomes a straightforward representation of reality – it shows the world as it is (to some extent). But as an art form, its power is in its ability to suggest other connotations, to use one image as a symbol or sign of another reality. For myself, I think Alfonso Cuarón has succeeded in this to some extent, but has muddied the waters by trying to suggest too many things at once. The result is a deeply affecting film which is bleaker than it needed to be because the hope is deferred for so long. For Cuarón, this is at it should be. He says,

At the end I cannot dictate a sense of hope for anybody because a sense of hope is something that’s very internal. We wanted the end to be a glimpse of a possibility of hope, for the audience to invest their own sense of hope into that ending. So if you’re a hopeful person you’ll see a lot of hope, and if you’re a bleak person you’ll see a complete hopelessness at the end.

And here Cuarón hints at what I think is the film’s most fundamental weakness. We invest our own sense of hope into it, but hope and salvation are down to us human beings. In P.D. James’s Christian worldview, hope and salvation ultimately come from God. That seems to me to be a solid basis for hope in a decaying world.

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