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Trailer for "Children of Men"

Here’s a question to get your New Year off to a cheery start: Do you hold out much hope for humanity making it to the end of the 21st century? I can’t say that I do, not without major shifts in the nature and size of world civilizations as we now know them. In bumper sticker terms, put me in the “If you’re not depressed, you haven’t been paying attention” camp.

Director Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) calls himself a hopeful person, but it’s hard to find that in the vision of the near future depicted in his brilliantly realized but incessantly bleak Children of Men. The film has been freely adapted from the novel of the same name by P. D. James, the British writer better known for her mysteries. She turned to science fiction for this 1992 effort that asks the question, “If there were no future, how would we behave?”

Cuarón and his screenwriting partner Timothy J. Sexton haven’t retained much from the novel aside from its central notion of mankind doomed by a plague of infertility: For no known reason, in the early years of the 21st century women around the world cease becoming pregnant.

The film opens in London of 2027, 18 years since the last births. Other disasters have also beset the world, though most are only obliquely hinted at or viewed in the headlines of newspapers that litter the garbage-strewn streets: nuclear disasters, terrorist attacks, small scale wars fought with weapons of mass destruction, sectarian and religious conflicts that escalated into oblivion. Britain is apparently the last remaining stronghold of civilization, a position it has maintained by outlawing all of the immigrants who have been flooding its borders.

For the time being society continues to function, at least for those who can manage their depression sufficiently to hold down jobs. One of these is Theo (Clive Owen, whose hangdog expression and incongruously puppy-dog eyes make him the perfect casting choice). A one-time radical who now holds down a bureaucratic desk job, he is reminded of his past when his former lover Julian (Julianne Moore) seeks him out. The leader of an outlawed resistance group fighting for the rights of immigrants, she wants him to use his remaining government connections to get an exit visa for Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), a young refugee woman who is miraculously pregnant. The plan is to get her to a group of scientists who are working on an offshore (and implicitly stateless) ship in an effort to save the human race.

You already know that much about Children of Men if you’ve seen the trailer for the film, which seems to encapsulate the entire plot into three minutes. But don’t be misled: Despite the efforts of the studio’s promotions department to make Cuarón’s film look like a standard issue sci-fi/action thriller, this film is anything but.

For one thing, Cuarón and his resourceful cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot almost all of the film as if it were a Dogma 95 project, with handheld cameras and natural lighting. They also painstakingly devised a series of intense action sequences as unbroken single takes. When you rewatch it on DVD in the future, you may well study those scenes and marvel at their complexity. The initial effect, though, is not to impress you with bravura technique but to pull you deeply into the action. And as the social fabric deteriorates at an increasing rate, with Theo and Kee eventually able to depend on no one but each other, the film tightens its grip. Aside from the aspect of mass infertility, which is a bit of a Maguffin, there is nothing here that doesn’t have an antecedent in the problems of our own time.

Cuarón aims at your viscera rather than your head, which is worth knowing in advance. What information you get about the state of the world in 2027 and how it got that way is shoehorned into the fringes of the movie, and most of the questions that will come to your mind won’t be answered. (For that you can check out James’ inexplicably out-of-print novel.) Spinning out current concerns into what we can only pray are not their inevitable conclusions, Cuarón depicts a dystopia as compelling as it is desolate. The story may end with a glimmer of hope, true; but over the end credits, Cuarón plays us a lacerating Jarvis Cocker song (is there any other kind?) about modern geopolitics with the refrain “Cunts are still running the world.” Happy holidays!