Week Of Janiuary 8, 2007 - Mon / Wed / Fri

January 10 , 2007

Making Book On Children Of Men….

My efforts to seek meaning in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men led me, inevitably, to the P.D. James novella, The Children of Men. And there, I found a rather shocking surprise.

There is a story.

The characters have depth.

The horror of the world we see is personal enough for it to stick.

The book is broken up into two sections, Omega (January to March 2021) and Alpha (October 2021). Most of the part you might think of as "the movie" is in the Alpha section. Of course, the movie veers away from the book in some very dramatic (or anti-dramatic) ways.

And here is where those of you who have not seen the film might want to check out… as in…

SPOILER WARNING

Really.

In discussing what the variations are, you will know too much if you keep reading before experiencing the film. I am also going to use the film as a short cut for explaining the book, so you will be spoiled and confused.

And now…

The story of PD James book, to simplify, is that Theodore Faron (Clive Owen), our hero, is a misanthropic guy who lost his wife - after a loveless marriage of convenience and indifference - died when he ran over their fifteen month old daughter.

The world he was essentially hiding from, years later, after humans suddenly, and without any explanation, lost the ability to procreate, is broken, as it is in the film. But it is more distant from our central characters. There are two dominating outside influencers in the book, both functionally and philosophically. One is The Omegas, the generation born in the final year of fertility, who have all become minor gods on the basis of their date of birth, yet are broken the way that people treated as gods tend to be.

The other big influencer is death, which in the book is a thing of occasional surprise, but often of ritual. The book calls the mass events Quietus, like the individual suicide kits in the film. In the book, Quietus are events where at one morning, dozens or hundreds of people would take the suicide drugs and head into the water, where the governmental agencies moved them further out to sea, simply as a matter of function, so there would not be bodies all along the shore. But the government also started coercing some to join the Quietus and would handle any unexpected fear responses with a controlling violence.

But it isn't just The Quietus that casts a shadow on the book's tale. It is the inevitability of death that hangs over everyone. So the book, unlike the movie, explores the many outgrowths of the inability of a sentient species to procreate, suddenly unable to, so naturally rationalize that there was some greater purpose for the species.

For me, the avoidance of this discussion is one of the biggest problems with the film. That is the central promise of this story. But it is never directly addressed in the film. The film starts from the assumption that the world is in chaos, the government is behaving badly, and that everyone lives in a certain terror of a neo-rationalized-fascism. But the film offers no evidence of that horrible, controlling beast of government, except as the apparent results of it swim by in visual images. It lets the viewer off the hook with this twist, as the fear of not being, as a species, becomes cross talk, a reason to move the story along, but nothing of any emotional weight. The film never confronts the snipping of our connection to our self-perceived infinite being.

The power of the pall is evidenced in the Xan character (Danny Huston as Nigel in the film), who in the book is The Warden of England and to whom his cousin Theo was once a top advisor. In the film, Theo is just a passive family member of a now-powerful who is sent with a specific goal of getting papers to transport the pregnant woman. But in the book, he was once a collaborator with the man who was now in charge, he chose to leave, and he now chooses to go back in order to discuss the concerns of the small rebel group.

And when he talks to Xan, there is all the arrogance and disconnection of power. But the power is not the ennui of the film's, "I don't think about it." He was a man who "made the banal words seem like a threat." He greets his cousin not alone, as in the film, but with his full governing Council by his side. There is a discussion of a Quietus that Theo witnessed, that went terribly wrong and, in it, all the rationalizations of the powerful that waves away responsibility and forgets the human face of the pain caused.

What Theo asks for is not a border pass, but to end the government persuasion and coercion towards Quietus suicides, to clean up the prison on The Isle of Man, to stop degrading men and women with forced fertility exams, to close the State-owned porn shops that were created to entice people to keep having sex even after the possibility of procreation stopped (with the state hoping that someone might get lucky/pregnant), and to stop treating the underclass of Sojourners as slaves.

Theo is, in the book, an active part of the story. And the choices he makes, he makes for reasons that are about his feelings and his guilt and his hopes, not money or a sly loyalty to his ex-wife that eventually evolves into a moral choice.

As he leaves Xan/Nigel, in the book, Xan softly threatens Theo and any further relationship he might have with the rebels - the Five Fishes - without much ambiguity. He also threatens other sanctions that are beyond Theo, like shutting down Oxford, so as to not have it be "a place of sedition." He tells Theo, "I'm not a tyrant, but I can't afford to be merciful. Whatever is necessary to do, I shall do."

And after Theo says goodbye to Julian and the others, returning without any concessions from Xan at all, they eventually put their demands on paper and circulate it around the country, the way rebels do. This leads to further debate and more pressure on Theo to give Xan information on the rebels. But the moment passes.

Seven months later, the second half of the book begins, and 15 pages in, Theo has been brought to see Julian for the first time in those months and is told the startling fact… she is pregnant.

Pretty much the rest of the book is about getting Julian somewhere safe where she can give birth. But that is where it starts getting really interesting, as Theo has to face not only his own feelings, but the various truths that leak out from the others in their small party.

Miriam the mid-wife is pretty much as we see her in the film. She is focused on the safety of the baby and the mother above all things. But instead of Theo now playing the role of protector to an ethnic, undefined, sexually uncharged, young woman, as in the film, he is in the book the outsider in a group of the mid-wife, the wife (Julian), the husband and presumed father, Rolf (who in most functions seems to be the character of Luke, played in the film by Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the oddball, Luke.

This is the stuff of powerful emotional conflict, as each of the characters, who we spend a lot of time with, has motivations, expected and otherwise. Again, we are dealing with the big picture, of a sentient species that can see the end of its own existence coming. But what makes it important… what makes it powerful… is that we are also dealing with the simple truths of human behavior as manifested by individuals.

If you want to read the book, even having seen the movie, the following will be a spoiler… so be careful…

SPOILER WARNING

The dubious nature of Rolf, who assumes he is about to become the ultimate Omega, seeding the world with his working sperm, starts becoming clear as this section of the book goes on. He fears ceding any power to Theo, getting into a petty argument over who gets to drive. Eventually, we learn that he has already considered his position and that both Julian and the Baby are only a short-term issue for him. He has a world to run and who won't bow to the power of his ability to procreate?

What he doesn't know is that he is not actually the father. The low man on the traveling totem pole, Luke, is the father. But we don't find this out until after Luke has been killed, sacrificing himself to save Julian from a rampaging band of Omegas.

Even in the scene of Luke's death, we learn so much more about the human spirit than we do in the movie's Omega attack that sees Julianne Moore's Julian killed in the film. In the book, The Omegas get off of smashing the car and the rebel group understands just how The Omegas have come to crave raw violence, more so than actions intended to achieve any real goal. They attack Luke's body, before and after he is dead, in a ritualistic way, not so much interested in what they are doing, but how it alleviates their boredom. Like the Quietus suicides, it is ritual… ritual that humans crave, no matter how ugly the ritual itself.

And once Rolf finds out that he is not the father, what does he do? He leaves the two women and Theo and runs to Xan, anxious to sell them out, to position himself with whatever little power he can, now that his sperm were as useless as any other man's.

Fortunately, Xan kills the scumbag after getting the information he wants about the whereabouts of Theo and Julian.

Ultimately, the child is born. Miriam, who left the manger (heh heh) to get supplies and was killed in the process, is dead, leaving just Theo, Julian, and The Baby. Theo knows, given Miriam's death, that they must be being watched by Xan and his people.

Xan, in an odd combination of hubris, love for his cousin (who he does not want to kill… or so he keeps saying), and curiosity, approaches the manger alone. Xan aims at Theo, warning. Theo, who has a gun with one bullet, aims back. And as the baby cries, Xan shoots. He misses Theo, but Theo's shot hits home. The Council comes out into the open. The Warden is dead. Theo, no doubt, never wanting power, will become the next leader. The child will offer hope to the world, so desperate to have a reason to believe in a future.

SPOILERS OVER

Big issues. Personal issues. Major themes. Simple human themes.

It's all there in the book. And all of it could have been done with Cuaron's magical filmmaking intact.

And I haven't even begun to dig into the book with real intent. The Michael Caine character of Jasper Palmer is just as charming, but again, he is a much richer character in the book. He acts. He is not acted upon. He also has some really odd eccentricities that are not as attractive. Yet, he is a wonderful character… even more so because of his less attractive qualities. (Still, he and the mid-wife are the characters that most effectively translate from page to film.)

There are a thousand little details from the film and from the book that can be used or not used, foreground or background. I don't seek literalist filmmaking. But what I got from the book that I never got from the film is the power of people making choices about their lives. Whatever the circumstances of their lives, the film suggests a repeated sense of inescapable, inevitable forward motion and lack of personal responsibility in the choices of the characters, excepting Julian, who is quickly killed off for her effort, without explanation, by her apparent significant other.

And maybe that is the core of my disappointment with the storytelling in the film. What I find compelling in films is people making choices and either taking or actively avoiding responsibility. And what this film seems quite happy to do is to allow outside forces to have a great deal more power than any human being. I don't mind a film about the forces that push us around our personal chess boards. But there is a way of approaching the story that makes that the story and that is not how I see this film. I see it claiming the personal and disconnecting from it enough to create safety for the viewer, who also gets the benefit of all those pretty pictures.

Perhaps that should be enough. It is not for me. All the more after having read the book - the blueprint - and imagining what could have been with the same great actors and the same great director.

E Me.

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