"Only after speaking with Cuarón did I realize why I wept: not with sorrow, but with hope for my own future. Children of Men imagines a fallen world, yes, but it also imagines a once-cynical person being reborn with purpose and clarity. It’s a story about how people like me, those who have the luxury of tuning out, need to awaken. This has been a brutal year, but we were already suffering from a kind of spiritual infertility: The old ideologies long ago stopped working. In a period where the philosophical pillars supporting the global left, right, and center are crumbling, the film’s desperate plea for the creation and protection of new ideas feels bracingly relevant.
Even though that lesson eluded me for a decade, I retained a passionate affection for Children of Men, long ago losing count of the number of times I’ve watched it. So it’s been deeply satisfying to see its robust second life among critics: It was particularly gratifying to see that, when the BBC polled 177 critics for a master list of the greatest films of the 21st century, Children of Men clocked in at number 13, beating out canonical flicks like 12 Years a Slave, Brokeback Mountain, Lost in Translation, and The Master...
Humans will continue to exist — and we have a responsibility to build a culture of respect and mutual assistance. It seems so dreadfully unlikely, but we are obligated to hope.
Cuarón is very specific about what he means by that word. For him, it is not a passive thing. It is not a messianic thing, either — he speaks derisively of the idea that you could vote for Barack Obama, then sit back passively and feel disappointed. “The hope is something that you create,” he says. “You live by hoping and then you create that change. Hope is trying to change your present for a better world. It’s pretty much up to you.”"
Posting mostly because I endorse watching the movie, it is very good - and the book is even better. I read t a few years ago and then immediately watched the movie, it was just one of those plots that so stuck with you and echoed. I don't like most apocalyptic fiction because it's so often about the apocalypse and the action instead of the experience of that survival and that experience seems like the most rich place for exploration.
Human societies have experienced so many apocalypses over the millennia and somehow we keep on regrouping, and we get the stories of victories but we don't learn how people function through the gray time in between. How they learn to rebuild even if every touchstone is gone.
This film doesn't get there, but it gets at the desire to rebuild, this industrious spark of humanity. I don't know, it just manages to capture something that feels very real and important.
No comments:
Post a Comment