The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 22 - ‘Children of Men’

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0:49I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is 25 for 25, a big picture special conversation show about our post-apocalyptic existence. our pick today is a remarkable film Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men real roller coaster on this one so a week and a half ago I reached out to you and I said Children of Men I don't know should we make a swap I'm not sure if I want to do this and I'm I thought it was maybe because my enthusiasm for the film had dimmed but I'm wondering now if it's because I knew what lay before me if I were to revisit the movie which is a very um emotionally wrenching virtuosically made movie about a possible near future, 2027?

1:322027, but with a lot of hallmarks of the way we live now. It certainly does. This is one of the most prescient films made in recent times and one of the best. So you never lost the faith in this, though. No, but the way that I'm working through this project, which I love, I'm having such a great time. Great. Me too. Not really, but okay. Is that once a week, I hear from you in crisis mode. And you have, you know, you have a crisis of faith. Sometimes you're on a plane. Sometimes you're just, you know, in plane mode at home. Because as we've discussed, that's a spiritual plane that you can reach.

2:08It's not location-based. Yeah. And you're like, I don't know how I feel about our choice. And I, Sean, just use that as an opportunity to talk to you about cinema, which is great. And that's why we do this podcast. And frankly, this year, there hasn't been a lot of real cinema released. So you go back and forth. You share your feelings. You go up. You go down. With Children of Men, at first, you were like, I think that this is like a five-star masterpiece that maybe I don't want to rewatch. That is what I said. And I said, okay, well, do you want to do Ichimama Tambien? Do you want to put it on hold?

2:45I threw out some other selections of things that did not make it onto the list. And we bumped up Something's Gotta Give and took a little more time. And in that time, you and I both rewatched the film, which we actually hadn't done before making the long list. And then we were like, oh, shit, this is way too low. This might actually, this might be top 10. Do we want to redo the list so that we can get it? this is I was flat out blown away by this and I knew that there I remembered being blown away by it when I saw it um and probably like I've probably seen it a couple times and I remember it being perfect but I too was not expecting both the emotional and just the holy shit movies response that I had to it yeah I think the list is now getting into a um it's going to be hard to debate territory, you know, where almost everything that we pick is going to have a kind of ecstatic quality in the filmmaking or the storytelling or the acting.

3:48This movie is clearly, I think, inarguably worthy of this list. And I didn't want to rewatch it in part because I remember the first time that I saw it in theaters and the absolute pit in my stomach that it left. I've revisited a couple of times. I think I rewatched it a couple of years ago. We talked about disaster movies, and I think I had framed it as a disaster movie and some people quibbled with that take, but the idea of a worldwide infertility pandemic is a disaster. Yeah, did you do it for disaster or apocalypse? I don't recall. I sort of remember it because the apocalypse episode was a very special episode.

4:25I think that was like April 2020. Oh, okay, cool. And that was where we were emotionally and we were like really sharing a lot. Was that like clever programming in the face of a pandemic? Yeah, it was. I'm very sorry about that. Maybe it was May 2020. Maybe it was June. Okay. And it might have been tied to a movie as well. It wasn't like Bill making you guys do a Contagion rewatchables on, you know, March 3rd, 2020. That wasn't ideal. No, it wasn't. But it was weirdly fair and reasonable. And you made a note in our document about Contagion here because these two films share the same thing. Now, Children of Men is played to a kind of extreme.

5:06in the story because you can see the sort of nation states and governments and the general rules of our society completely folding in on themselves and a world falling apart in this film it is the absolute end game of destruction for if something like this were to transpire so just the details of the film so we're clear as i said it's directed by cuarone i'd like to talk about him for quite a while because he might be the world's greatest living filmmaker who has not made a movie in seven years. And so he has not been a constant source of discussion on the show since Roma, which is really when you and I started cooking on the show.

5:42We haven't had a lot of opportunities to discuss him, but he also has a writing credit on this film. There are a number of credited writers on this movie, including Timothy J. Sexton, David Arada, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby. And it's based on The Children of Men by P.D. James. P.D. James, a renowned English novelist who she died about 10 years ago and I think this is really the only major film of note that is adapted from her work. She's best known for detective stories. Right. Your overlooking death comes to Pemberley but that's fine. That's on your... I mean, was that released in America? Like, I know it exists but like...

6:20It was but I think it might have been one of those like British TV specials to something. Right, right, right. That's fine. Matthew Rhys, it's a murder mystery set at the fictional home from Pride and Prejudice, for those of you not on the level. I see. Okay, so clearly this is important to you. Pemberley is where Mr. Darcy lives. And Matthew Rhys plays Mr. Darcy, I believe, in The Death Comes to Pemberley. Yeah, it was at P.D. I've read both the book and seen the film. That's very funny. I was going to say, P.D. James' her work is very Amanda-coded. Yes. And this novel is not very P.D. James.

6:54No. I think it's interesting, of course, a woman writing a kind of, sci-fi dystopian nightmare military movie or military novel that, you know, features fertility as a key subject seems notable. The movie stars Clive Owen, Claire Hope Achete, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, Charlie Hunnam, and Michael Caine. It is notably as all of Cuaron's movies are shot by Emmanuel Chivo Lubezki, who is also, along with Cuaron, widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers, is arguably the greatest cinematographer in the world, give or take a Roger Deakins. And this movie, which charts basically what happens to this small pocket of rebels in the face of this infertility epidemic, which has been going on for well over 15 years.

7:46It's, I guess, 18 years is the extent. Yeah, and three months and something days. Yes, and so the film isn't just a portrait of kind of the world falling apart. It's a portrait particularly of two modes of rebellion and how to save humanity. And the way to do that is to find somebody who can give birth. And of course, they do find someone in this story who can give birth. Clive Owen is our perspective character. He is a man who was once a rebel or was once a progressive, who has kind of slipped out of the cause and is a bit lost until he is drawn back into it by his former wife, lover, who's portrayed by Julianne Moore.

8:22And then he becomes kind of an agent of change throughout this story. So you mentioned that you saw it a long time ago. You loved it. You watched it again. It could be a top 10 movie. It notes the arbitrary nature of our list. What else did you feel while you were watching the movie? I thought of your sentence of this might be like a five-star masterpiece and or, you know, conventional movie nerd wisdom that this is like a quote-unquote perfect film. It is a perfect screenplay. It is a perfect technical execution. There is a stunning amount of like capital C, like camera work, athletic filmmaking.

9:03It's most famous for the single action, single, single shot action sequences. Particularly there's a car attack, which is terrifying. And then there is a raid, like a battle sequence at the end that are filmed. You know, there's, you know, it's not like the studio. They're using a whip pin or whatever. But it is. But the effect is that you are just watching a single take of absolutely wild stuff happening. But the whole movie is that level of astonishing filmmaking and craft that works totally with the screenplay. It's not just doing it to be like, ooh, and here's our one-er. Like, ooh, here we go.

9:56Look at us use the camera. It is, it works with the story. It works beautifully to, the way that you see this world because of the way they film it with just the one camera and just following people is like, is magnificent because you can both learn everything. But as you said, it is, it's focused on a small group of people. And so the way that they establish the world, the way they do exposition, even the visual composition of what you see in a frame and how you see. And there, it's like absolutely grotesque things are happening in the background of almost every shot, but they are in the background.

10:43You mentioned Charlie Hunnam is in this movie. I don't think his face is ever close enough to the camera to actually face ID Charlie Hunnam. He may never be in focus. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, but that works with what the story itself, which is of like this one person who's co-opted in to try to figure out like his path and this other person's path to safety and to savior of the world. and without knowing what else is going on because at this point in the existence of the world, like all you have is what you're doing every day and then whatever like propaganda is being artfully displayed on the various televisions.

11:29So it is like the real, it is practice like form and function and all working together in a way that like is exhilarating. So the film, almost nothing that you see in the movie, this is not a POV movie. It's not through the eyes of Theo, the Clydebone character. But almost everything that you see, the sort of panorama of this world, is through his experience of the world. The thing is, is that it shows you those things, but it doesn't zero in on them. It doesn't let you sit in them because essentially this character is always on the move. A handful of times when he's sitting, when he's in the home with Michael Caine's character, This sort of like burnt out hippie who is his sort of former, you know, mentor, advisor and friend.

12:15You know, moments when they have been captured and they're, you know, the birth sequence late in the film is a sustained period of time where there's not a lot of movement. But the bulk of this film, these characters are on their feet and moving. And so even though we don't necessarily get every detail of this universe explained to us, we get the occasional kind of news report where we hear something on television or on the radio. Right. But the idea of how the refugee camps work as opposed to why they started and where they are specifically located, like we get dribs and drabs, but experientially we understand and feel everything.

12:51I think that this serves the story really well. I think when I look back on the movie, my only note is that I just wish I knew the characters a little bit better. I don't necessarily need to know Julian and Theo. I think what Clive Owen and Julianne Moore get to do and how they get to show us what was of their relationship and what they lost when their son died is enough. Every other character in the movie, I wish I understood Chiwetel Ejiofor just a little bit more. I like what he represents as a character, which is there are two sides to progress, to the idea of reaching progress. And I think the movie is sophisticated about this kind of forward action, direct action approach, which is the one he is taking, one that is violent, one that is aggressive, one that is meant to make a kind of spectacle of the rebellion versus the one that Julian and Theo ultimately portrays, which is like a humanist approach to this kind of thing.

13:46But the movie gives you a lot. Even with the Chiwetel Ejiofor character, Luke, I believe, which there's a lot of Bible running through this. There certainly is. But with a nice twist in that particular scene where the character once the baby is born um i like i i think is like absolutely like astonishing and the way that every single person in the this movie responds to the sight of this baby is like so revealing i think about the characters and the world and he has that moment where he's like sitting up by a window and just being like i'd forgotten how beautiful they are and he's so visibly moved and also just like in between just shooting, you know, out the window.

14:35But I think he does an incredible job in that. And even those few moments of this character being still so dead set on his ways, but also absolutely overcome with what is essentially like hope, you know, in corporeal form for the first time for literally every single person in the world is, I think, really beautiful and says enough about him. And then also the fact that he keeps being like, I need him, I need him. And then there's that great moment of, no, it's a girl. And then he says, I had a sister once. Like, I do kind of feel like you get moments. I guess you don't know that much about Charlie Hunnam, except like he has dreads and he's not in focus.

15:15A lot of white dreads in this. There are. Yeah. That's an interesting choice. I think, I haven't read this novel. I actually would like to give it a look because I think in novel form stories like this, characters are just deep. Right. this is a movie about images and feeling. It is not a movie about character development. And archetypes, I think.

15:38There's a Virgin Mary, Jesus. Yeah, absolutely. I know what we're drawing on here. Slavoj Zizek, the famed thinker and film fan, is a really big fan of this movie and has talked about it and written about it in the past. One of the things that he points out that I think is super interesting is there's no sex in the movie. You know, that the conception is meant to seem immaculate if not literally then figuratively. And even between former lovers like Theo and Julian, we don't see sex. Like that isn't really what this world is about. It's about survival and it's about procreation but not in the same way.

16:18And I think like removing that I think it kind of like withstands some of that religious imagery in a way. I think this is such an interesting movie for Cuaron to have chosen at this stage of his career because he's coming off of Itou Mama Tambien which he says he sees as essentially his first real movie. He had made two films before that and those films were well received and he was considered, he made three films before that they were very well received but he was starting to feel like an assignment director, somebody who would get sent screenplays and would decide whether he wanted to make them.

16:58He made one film in his native Mexico, Solo con tu parejo. He made A Little Princess and he made Great Expectations, Great Expectations, a kind of much touted film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, adaptation of Dickens that fizzled pretty hard. And so he resets. Don't fast forward past Little Princess though. It's a good film. I haven't seen it in a very long time. I mean, he doesn't have any bad films. And what's interesting is that Solo con tu pareja and A Little Princess and Great Expectations are all very different from one another. The production designs are very different. The pacing and tone is very different.

17:34He's like a real shapeshifter filmmaker. Ituma Matambien is even more different from those films. That's like a road movie. It's a very personal movie. It's a movie about friendship, about love, about who you are really in love with, identity, sexuality, freedom, right? In the face of the encroaching structures of life. Right. And the filmmaking style of that movie is weirdly very similar, even though the kind of movie it is is very different, which is like it's a lot of handheld. It's a lot of following, a lot of sort of like follow filmmaking where your character is moving through the world and you're seeing their back and you're seeing what they're seeing very clearly.

18:13And you can see In Itoumama Tambien, which I really strongly considered pushing for in this spot because I'm very personally affected by the story in that movie. But the fact that he makes that movie then takes a Harry Potter job. Yeah. And does a good job. And it's one of the best franchise movies of the 21st century in Prisoner of Azkaban. And then it's almost like he has to cleanse out the taste of the franchise, of the paycheck that he got and makes this movie, which is just the most grim subject matter possibly imaginable. And a real cocktail of grim subject matters. I haven't read the full P.D.

18:53James novel. I read some of it. But the refugee element of this film, which is a major part of the plot in that the key, the mother figure, is a refugee and needs to be able to travel. but there are a huge amount of restrictions. And also, I mean, she's constantly in danger in Britain. And then also visually, we pass cages, we pass camps. There is the final act takes place in a camp. So that is all stuff that Cuaron added, that he used the novel as a sort of jumping off point. And the P.D. James novel, as you know, I did jumping back and forth. is, as best I could tell, kind of more class focused.

19:46And that is what peters out in the, which, you know, makes sense, a British novel. You guys are never going to get over that, apparently. I mean, we aren't either. But along with the infertility, which, you know, just becomes just the total lack of hope and a future and that there's nothing to live for. And the movie does like amazing images, you know, the empty playground and then key on the empty playground. I feel a little sick right now just thinking about it. So it brings all of that to life. And then it adds in a lot of images that we have come to have comps for in real life. And it is really pretty astonishing and upsetting and timely.

20:32If you situate the movie upon its release, it's 2006. We're engaged in international conflict in the United States of America. the P.D. James novels 1992 is when it's published. So this film in a post 9-11 world, in a Operation Iraqi Freedom universe. I mean, there are some like Abu Ghraib references in the background. There's clearly a lot of these forces, a lot of these current events are informing a lot of what Cuaron and the writers are after in terms of what they're trying to portray about. Effectively, what can happen and what like a police state can do in the face of a crisis like this, that this would send the world into a tailspin and that its citizenry would then be really vulnerable to the powers that be taking more control and creating, you know, there's these interesting images of protest in the movie that are shot through the lens of faith.

21:21You know, a lot of the protesters are sort of like, will God ever forgive us for what we have done and we are being punished for this transgression? And then there are other examples where there is just this pure sort of like, like I said, direct action, progressive citizenry that is attempting to form and use sometimes nonviolent, sometimes violent means to accomplish their goals. But the fact that it was made in 2006 and all of these events are happening and informing them doesn't foresee what's coming with the first Trump administration, with what's happening with ICE, with what's happening with literally children in cages and parental separation and all these awful things that have happened in our world in the last 10 years.

22:01But Cuaron and the writers are smart enough to know that that reality was in touching distance. Obviously, we don't live inside of children of men. That would be a gross overstatement. But there are literal details of this world that are shown in the movie that are actually happening right now. And, you know, this is usually not a very serious show. We usually like to have a lot of fun. But the movie is very chilling in the way it portrays some of these things. It's, and honestly, really, that in those images of the cages, in the recreation of some of the torture images, things do not look that different.

22:34And one of the amazing and incredibly scary parts of this film is the way it creates a dystopia that is really not that far from, you know, everything is like grimier, but it's set in London and it's like Big Ben is still there and like St. Paul's is still there and there's still a double-decker bus. and the opening shot is of the Clive Owen character, Theo, in a coffee shop where he's going to get coffee and so is everyone else. The world is going on. Exactly. It's continuing. It's the BCC instead of the BBC, I guess, but they use the chime. They get really close to that, as close as they can.

23:20It's reporting on horrors worldwide, but you know in its like very calm BBC voice so that the fact that the world is so recognizable um like in this dystopia and then also that so many of the images from the like the migrant crisis to you know torture to like militarization to all of these issues are also so recognizable from real life is, I mean, it's emotionally walloping. It's really, really messed up. And we didn't even mention the pandemic stuff, which is just like, it's like a back note. But the Theo and Julianne, who's that's Julianne Moore is named Julianne. Julianne, yeah. Their son dies and died in a flu pandemic.

24:10Yeah. Into like 2008 or something. But I mean, you know, that's what COVID was. It's like, it's just what the hell. There are a lot of scientists and futurists who have been foretelling matters like this. And, you know, it's not just to have just been prescient would not have been enough. Obviously, it's the collision of this incredible filmmaking style. Truly amazing actors being thrust into this world and being able to give performances. Like we always talk about the kind of physicality and athleticism of the filmmakers and of the camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Clive Bowen's performance in this movie, specifically that raid that you're talking about near the end of the film when he's been separated from Key and he's trying to find her by following the baby's cries and the camera is following him.

24:50And he is like leaping from space to space. I feel nauseous right now. He really is giving an amazing physical performance in this movie. You know, he's an actor who was like top of the billing star for a hot minute. You know, this is around the time of Closer, the Mike Nichols film. You know, coming out of the big success of Croupier, he made a couple of cool movies Did a very important Wimbledon like intro voiceover. I don't remember that, but I'll take your word for it. But he's fantastic in this movie. The other thing that I wanted to note is I think the music is so, so good. It's so good.

25:24So John Tavener composed the music and there are a ton of great needle drops. There's one that sticks out in my, well, there's two that stick out in my mind. One, as we're seeing the sort of landscape of London that is sort of burnt out and you've got protesters and you've got military and police and people trying to go about their day. You can hear in the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson, which is sort of like dystopian 70s prog rock epic. And then the sequence when we first see Theo and Michael Caine's character seated together, they're listening. He's Michael Caine is listening to music.

25:57He cares for his wife, who it appears has Alzheimer's or is, you know, disconnected somehow. I think, I mean, they, in background in, like, newspapers, suggest that she was, like, tortured as well. Okay. Because, like, there's some headline MA5 tortures journalist or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he cares for her, grows pot in his house, and tries to while away the hours while keeping the faith for the cause. And they're listening to a song called Life in a Glass House by Radiohead, which is the last song on Amnesia. and it's a very unusual Radiohead song and features like a New Orleans brass band and it sounds like a funeral dirge.

26:37It sounds like literally Radiohead is like walking down the streets in New Orleans and Tom York is like wailing his weird Tom York wail surrounded by this huge brass band. And I've always loved that song and I've always been like this is the song you play like right before you die. So there are a handful of really clever needle drops mixed in with this sort of choral symphonic score throughout the film that toggles between doom and hope. Which is really what the movie is. The movie is a story about people who are on the precipice of disaster trying to find a reason to keep going to survive to find something else.