"Children of Men"

This smoldering picture, based on P.D. James' dystopian novel, may be the bleakest movie you'll ever want to see twice.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Theo (Clive Owen) and Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey)

Dec. 25, 2006 | "Children of Men" takes place in 2027, in the grayest London imaginable, in a world where humans have lost the ability to reproduce. (The youngest person alive is 18.) The streets are plastered with literature entreating native Britons to smoke out and turn in illegal immigrants: In a world that's gone to hell, no country can afford generosity to outsiders. Terrorism and war have destroyed whole nations. Britain soldiers on, but for those who just can't take it anymore, suicide is encouraged: There's even a special government-sanctioned drug, with its own Lunesta-style commercial presenting death as a dream state you can just drift into, a vast improvement on the suffocating present.

"Children of Men," directed by Alfonso Cuarón and based on P.D. James' 1992 dystopian novel, is the bleakest movie I've ever wanted to see twice. Coming nearly 15 years after James' novel, it takes into account world events that she could never have dreamed of. Yet the picture doesn't so much build dread as smolder with it, as if we'd landed on a scorched, broken world still desperately trying to throw off some warmth.

And that right there is the Cuarón touch: The director of movies like "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Y Tu Mamá También," pictures that radiate joy (even if, in places, they harbor their share of darkness), Cuarón at first seems like an odd choice to direct a pessimistic meditation on a world without children. But Cuarón is really the perfect choice: A filmmaker so responsive to joy and pleasure is our best guide to a world in which those essentials have gone missing. (If the picture had been made by, say, Lars von Trier, a filmmaker who fears for humankind but doesn't care much for people, a dystopia would just be business as usual.) "Children of Men" is a solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. Cuarón, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away.

Clive Owen plays Theo, a former activist who, for reasons that become clear as the story moves forward, has given up on the idea of change. With his weary eyes and stubborn, perpetual 5 o'clock shadow, Theo has the look of a man who has just been pulled through a keyhole. In the movie's first half-hour, we're given bits of his past to piece together for ourselves. We meet his close friend and confidant, a raffish perennial hippie named Jasper (Michael Caine), who seems to know more about him than anyone. Jasper lives in seclusion with his wife, a former journalist, who has been in a catatonic state for years after having been tortured by MI5. (We pick up that information as the camera scans on old newspaper clippings, an example of the subtlety with which Cuarón works here and of the movie's point of view: In this world, it's a given that democratic governments torture citizens who dissent.)

Suddenly, and not accidentally, Theo becomes reunited with Julian (Julianne Moore), his one-time, estranged lover, who hasn't given up on this despairing world as he has. A radical who's fighting for a nearly hopeless cause, she forces Theo to help her. The other players in this serpentine drama include Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in an elegant, unsettling performance), an aggressive comrade of Julian's; Miriam (the wonderful Pam Ferris), a watchful, wary presence whose job becomes clear as the story unfolds; and a sullen (at least at first) young girl named Kee (the vibrant Claire-Hope Ashitey), whose very name suggests how important she might be to humankind's future.

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