Children of Men

James Joyce once observed that “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” But what if existence were even worse than Joyce imagined? What if we lived in a present with no hope of a future, one where human history was about to end? Would reality become a nightmare from which there was no awakening?

These are questions the director, Alfonso Cuaron, asks in his brilliant movie, “The Children of Men.” Set in a dystopian near future, the film follows the life of Theo, a former political activist and now disaffected bureaucrat who lives in the London of 2027. Powerfully portrayed by a suitably dour Clive Owens, Theo lives in a childless world where women have been infertile since 2009. Because the end of human history is seemingly near, Theo and virtually everyone else have abandoned all hope.

Cuaron’s greatest strength as a director is his ability to evoke compassion. He seems to understand that compassion arises from what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls the Aristotelian “acknowledgement that one has possibilities and vulnerabilities similar to those of the sufferer.” That is, perhaps, why Cuaron masterfully creates a dystopian Britain of 2027 that is disturbingly similar to our world. The main difference is that the ideological battleground in the movie is Britain, not Iraq. London has become modern-day Baghdad, while the rest of the world has become far worse.

In this manner, the movie looks to the future to confirm our worst political fears of the present. We feel compassion for the characters in the movie because we understand their present may become our horrifying future. In sum and substance, they are a chilling representation of what the world would be like “if” the destabilizing turmoil

present in the Middle East did become the future state of the world.

At first, Cuaron brilliantly interweaves the seeming hopelessness of his dystopia into the fabric of Theo’s life. As Theo rides home on the subway, there is graffiti that says “Last One To Die–Please Turn Off The Lights.” And as he awakens, there is an advertisement for Quietus, a painless suicide drug that alludes to Hamlet’s tortured reflections on suicide (Shall I make my “quietus with a bare bodkin?”). However, Cuaron’s dystopia transforms the profound moral implications of assisted suicide (think Jack Kevorkian) into nothing more than a politically engineered palliative for hopelessness.

Deprived of a future, we learn humanity lost hope when it was denied the purpose of common historical development. British television shows pictures of a world in flames, as it gravely intones: “The world has collapsed…Only Britain soldiers on.” But even Britain is an embattled political state where terrorists are as contemptibly violent as the government is ruthlessly brutal. Capturing resonant images of terrorizing fear, unexpected bombings, ransacked buildings, and Abu Ghraib-type abuse, the movie powerfully evokes despair, as these images recall current news footage and photography of the Middle East. Terrorists bomb cafés and execute innocents, while the government’s “Homeland Security” imprisons illegal immigrants, or “fugees,” in squalid concentration camps.