Watching “Children of Men” today, directed by acclaimed Mexican-American director Alfonso Cuarón, is like watching the news on a given day. The film, based on crime fiction writer P.D. James’ book of the same name was released back in 2006, in the wake of the filmmaker directing one of the most-beloved Harry Potter films in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” which saw the titular character and his classmates age considerably from the prior, Chris Columbus-directed films’ more saccharine and sentimental aesthetic.
Set in 2027, the film opens with a news broadcast about the death of “Baby Diego,” an 18-year-old who was the last person born before humankind became infertile. And with the world and humanity facing the very real reality of extinction within a few generations, the world has fallen into war and economic depression.
Cuarón’s “Children of Men” is set in a dystopian now contemporary Britain in the wake of unexplained worldwide infertility, the film never explains exactly why people have become infertile. Although, the meat of the film is in the background.
But we’ll get to that. First, I have to give you the main plot, which revolves around a former activist turned bureaucrat named Theo (Clive Owen) who is contacted by his estranged wife (Julianne Moore) and asked for transit papers to get a young refugee woman named Kee across the border and out of England.
It’s here where the background begins to move to the foreground, because although the film is about a journey across a dystopian, totalitarian police state England, with concentration camps hoarding and placing migrants in what can only be described as ghettos, and the driving force behind the plot is Kee, a pregnant woman–the first one in 18 years–what the story is really trying to explain is how governments and other bureaucratic bodies treat the disenfranchised.
We see it throughout the film in images ripped straight from the Balkan Wars that allude to “Guernica,” a Picasso painting that depicts the horrors of war while simultaneously referencing Michaelangelo’s “La Pieta.”
“Poor fugees,” says Theo’s hippy friend Jasper (Michael Caine) in the film. “After escaping the worst atrocities, and making it all the way to England, our government hunts them down like cockroaches.”
And yet, despite this movie being made in the early aughts, at the height of the War on Terror, it depicts a world more aligned to the world we live in, wherein the expansion of capital and business have worsened parts of the world already reeling from the effects of global warming or decades of Western-led coups and forced people to seek salvation elsewhere, those very same desperate people are seen as an unwanted problem.
And this is not simply a one-size-fits-all critique of politics, both sides share blame in the ways that these issues have been handled: From Trump’s rhetoric on migrants — including allusions he’s made to refugees in Springfield, Ohio where on a national debate stage he peddled far-right conspiracy theories — to the mishandling of migrants at the southern border and the failures of Biden’s regime to solve slowly exacerbated issues in South and Central America that have led to mass migrations north.
No matter the politics, no matter the country–look no further than Brexit and other anti-migrant sentiments in Europe–we live in a world similar to the one depicted in Cuarón’s film. Even down to the film’s protagonist having lost a son with his estranged wife due to a flu pandemic in years prior to the film’s main story.
And before you launch conspiracy theories, or assume that Cuarón or the P.D. James knew something, look no further than the recent film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise” by filmmaker Noah Baumbach, which depicts a small Ohio town dealing with a chemical outbreak in the wake of a train crash, which was released just months before a train crash in New Palestine, Ohio.
It’s not a conspiracy, the reality more often than not is that in these instances, the authors, filmmakers, etc. recognized something happening in the world at large. With “Children of Men” it was growing global issues and migration, with “White Noise,” commercialism and the ways in which new commercial items and the chemicals that make them possible are moved about the country, making them readily available–the film opening and closing with scenes about the miracles of the modern grocery store, which has everything you might need, all the time, just a few short blocks from your home–but at what cost?
So, we’ll close on that. With the old adage that art imitates life, but also, sometimes life imitates art, not because of anything other than that, sometimes art is merely a reflection of the world we live in, the world experienced and then pushed back out for us, for our consumption. All we need to do is listen, and perhaps we might hear an echo of the terrors we’re currently living through, or of the terrors of people we might never know.
