Children of Men (2006)
I have been told, repeatedly, that Children of Men is the perfect Advent movie. I have also been told, repeatedly and more frequently in the past few years, that Children of Men is prescient, the perfect movie For Our Times. I intended to watch it two years ago, and again last year, and both times realized I’d failed to make the time when Christmas came around. It didn’t feel right to watch it outside of its appointed time, so I waited for the seasons to turn, and today, I finally caught up.
I’m not going to talk about how Children of Men is the SF movie that captures the feeling of These Uncertain Times best. Those takes exist elsewhere, and they are legion. I find them uninspired. All good SF holds up a mirror to the time and place in which it is written. If it’s accurate, it resonates; if it’s true, it remains true, even after the time in which the work was created has passed. Like any living genre, SF grows and adapts. It just happens to be very good at the “adapting” part, because the genre’s greats understand that accuracy down to the contemporary minute is much less important than understanding how human nature works, given a set of hypotheticals.
Children of Men is one such movie. Its story would be true in any other place and setting. But it works so well in part because it understands its own place and that setting in a visceral way, down to Emmanuel Lubeszki’s long, urgent tracking shots and the threadbare set design. At the same time, the film deals in a kind of timelessness: human beings have been dehumanizing other human beings for as long as history has been recorded. The shots of refugees crowded into a bus, bundled in cages, strip-searched and herded and lined up and executed, all recall the atrocities of the Holocaust and Vietnam and so many other human rights violations. We have short memories. When we learn about today’s outrage, we forget yesterday’s, and the old wounds feel fresh when we’re reminded of them again. Children of Men’s people in cages hurts, not because we’ve seen it on the news recently, but because we keep seeing it, over and over again, and we keep forgetting.
Which brings me back to the idea of Children of Men as an Advent movie. I agree with the people who told me it was; I’m also not going to repeat their argument. I’m more interested in questions about liturgy than plot.
A small digression (please bear with me): I had a priest in grad school who helped cultivate my appreciation for liturgy. She talked about saying the Nicene Creed every Sunday, even when she didn’t feel like it. There’s a moment in the creed when many bow as they say the words: “for us and for our salvation [Jesus] came down from heaven…” My priest talked about going through the motions, and how, even when she was tired or mentally checked out, whenever she bowed during the creed, she remembered why she was there. The actions were tied tightly with her attitude; the act of repeating her beliefs helped her to remember why she believed.
I think this idea of repetition and remembrance, both on the small-scale week-to-week sharing of the creed, and the large-scale cycle of the liturgy, are incredibly important. We forget to remember unless we’re reminded to. I think it’s part of the reason why I appreciate genre fiction so much: once the conventions have been established, it’s possible to work within carefully defined constraints to tell a story that is both new and recognizable. Setting aside all its other merits—and they are many: the movie is extraordinary in terms of craft—Children of Men would still be an ideal Advent movie. Not because of its plot similarities to the traditional Christmas story, but because of its willingness to delve into the fallibility of human nature. I wept when Kee and Theo walked through a suddenly-quiet battlefield, carrying the child to safety; the baby’s cry cracking a suddenly silent world moved me to tears. But the scene did not feel true until it reached its end. The moment the baby is safely out of range, soldiers and rebels open fire again, and the fighting continues as though the child had never passed through. I cried when the baby was born; I cried throughout the battle. But the pieces of the movie that pierced me most deeply were the moments in which people, in the middle of death, saw hope and chose to repeat the darkness they’ve been living in anyway.
