Bleak chill of future tightens grip

'Children' offers dire picture of world 20 years from now

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 5, 2007 at midnight

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Come 2027, the year Children of Men takes place, the movie may have achieved a status few other movies of the moment will be able to match.

Of course, I'm speculating, but why not? With Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron, who directed the last Harry Potter movie, has liberated himself from the demands of children's fiction, serving up a forbidding futuristic drama that offers only the faintest glimmer of hope.

Children of Men operates with fast-forward audacity to present a world in dire straits, as Cuaron offers yet another dystopian vision. For reasons that aren't entirely clear - although they're strongly suggested - women no longer are able to bear children.

The story begins in an atmosphere of reinforced gloom. The world has just learned that the youngest person on the planet, an 18-year-old boy, has passed away. The future of humanity may have been sealed.

Apparently stripped of hope, the population of London - one of the few places that still offers a semblance of "secure" living - tries to soldier on, albeit under the burden of fascist rule.

Not surprisingly, the city's problems are strewn about its streets like rubble. Hordes of illegal immigrants want to penetrate the zone of relative safety London affords. An atmosphere of near chaos prevails: There are rebels, odd religious groups, terrorists and those who have withdrawn into the illusory comforts of their own singular obsessions.

Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a disaffected man who feigns sincere interest in the preoccupations of his society, becomes the central figure in Cuaron's doom-struck drama. In reality, Theo remains skeptical about most everything, and Owen imbues him with a brooding quality that becomes easier to understand as the film progresses.

Through a connection in his past, Theo tumbles into a story that has the movie careering through car chases, violent encounters and a long battle that's photographed by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki with Blackhawk Down-like intensity.

Early on, rebels led by Theo's ex-wife (Julianne Moore) capture him. Theo eventually learns that a woman named Kee (Claire- Hope Ashitey) has become pregnant. It's Theo's job to see Kee to safety by delivering her to a group called the Human Project. The Human Project apparently devotes itself to perpetuating humanity amid all the world's dangers.

And the world definitely reeks of danger, fueled by Islamic terrorists, threats to personal security and a pervasive atmosphere of hopelessness. It's as if the five listed screenwriters, working from a novel by P.D. James, took every alarming current trend and quadrupled it.

Children of Men does not qualify as ordinary entertainment, primarily because it exudes the chill of frozen slush on heavily trafficked roads. Held in the grip of perpetual disaster, the characters don't develop much by way of relationships.

Cuaron wisely keeps the story barreling along, possibly subscribing to the theory that the only way totally to make the story convincing is to kick the feet out from under the audience. Cuaron does this with skill and with a style that places Children of Men among the top ranked visual achievements of the year. (Children of Men was released in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day.)

In a movie that hits many strange notes, Michael Caine manages to out-weird them all. Caine plays Jasper, an aging, dope-smoking hippie with a retro haircut (or lack of one) that makes him look like a geriatric hard-rocker. Caine provides the movie's only comic relief, and it's predictably short-lived.

Cuaron, a director of widely recognized skills, has attracted a first-rate cast to his eerie endeavor The small roles are beautifully cast. The fine British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor portrays Luke, a terrorist, and Peter Mullan appears as Syd, a deranged military officer.

The movie's credibility owes much to spectacularly grim production design - from the damp, littered streets of London, to the obscene disorder of a free zone where immigrants reside to Jasper's verdant forest hideaway.

Cuaron doesn't dot every "i" and cross every "t," and a few moments in Children of Men are nearly laughable, but the movie has a kind of mesmeric power, and it asks us to contemplate the possibility that the future for man we take for granted is by no means guaranteed.

I'd look for this one to become a major cult favorite. You can see it now or wait 20 years until the movie has found a niche among equally visionary movies that have the capacity to compel, alarm and shake things up.

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