Children of Men — Tomorrow Is a Boat

The single takes made the reputation; the grief in the corners of the frame made the film.

Ninety seconds. That is all the miracle gets. The battle for the Bexhill refugee camp is chewing through a tenement floor by floor when a newborn starts to cry, and the war simply stops. Soldiers lower their rifles and cross themselves. Refugees stretch out their hands to brush the blanket as Theo and Kee carry the first child born on earth in eighteen years down an open stairwell, past men who were killing each other a minute ago and will be killing each other again shortly. Somebody yells the ceasefire down the line. The camera walks out with them, unbroken, into flat gray daylight. Then a rocket hits, and the shooting resumes the way rain resumes. Every heart in range has been changed. Not one fact on the ground has. That is the scene the whole picture exists to earn, and its honesty is the whole picture in miniature. In Alfonso Cuaron’s masterpiece, hope is not a feeling that comes over you. It is a job you finish anyway.

The story is a nativity rebuilt as a courier run. London, 2027. Eighteen years of global infertility nobody can explain. The youngest human alive, a celebrity called Baby Diego, has just been stabbed by an admirer he waved off, and the whole planet mourns him like a nephew, because he was the last proof the species still had a pulse. Britain soldiers on, the propaganda insists, and here is what soldiering on looks like: cages full of migrants on the high street, deportation buses idling at the curb, suicide kits sold over the counter under a soothing brand name. Theo Faron, an activist hollowed out into a ministry clerk, tips whiskey into his morning coffee and steps out of a cafe seconds before it blows. Then his ex-wife Julian surfaces, wanting to buy his government connections for a set of transit papers, and the cargo turns out to be Kee, a refugee eight months pregnant with the thing the world stopped believing in. Every faction that learns she exists, the state and the revolution both, wants her for a flag. This is the story of the one man who ends up wanting her safe.

Back in 2006 the craft took the headlines, and it had earned them. The roadside ambush plays in one unbroken take from inside the car, the camera pivoting on a rig built into the roof. The six-minute walk through the Bexhill battle catches blood on the lens and leaves it there, because wiping it clean would have been a lie. But watch it now and the long takes are almost the least of it. What made the film permanent is its peripheral vision. Cuaron’s camera keeps getting pulled off the plot by sorrow the plot has no use for: the caged elderly on the pavement, livestock burning in the fields, a woman keening over her son’s body on a shelled street, arranged like a wire photo out of the Balkans. His design rule was blunt: nothing on screen could be invented. Every horror had to come from an existing photograph of the actual present. The hood from Abu Ghraib. The cages from Guantanamo. The camps from the evening news. That rule is why the film has aged backward. It was never a prediction. It was a scrapbook of things already happening somewhere else, mailed forward to a decade that would recognize them at home.

People praise the single takes as immersion, and that undersells what they do, which is cancel mercy. When Julian is shot through the windshield mid-laugh, minutes after a ping-pong ball trick briefly resurrected an entire marriage, there is no cutaway to absorb the blow, no reaction shot to tell you what to feel. The scene has to go on living with the body in it, the way a day does. Clive Owen builds Theo out of that same grammar. He is the rare action lead whose heroism is nothing but stamina: he never fires a shot in the entire film, spends the climax armed with a newborn, and does his best acting with his back, hauling, shielding, staggering forward in sandals. Michael Caine’s Jasper, an old radical with a catatonic wife, a strain called Strawberry Cough, and a standing pull-my-finger routine, carries the film’s whole case for joy, and then pays it off with the bravest act in the picture: he tells the joke one last time to the man about to kill him, and buys his fleeing guests sixty more seconds of head start. And Claire-Hope Ashitey keeps Kee a person inside a role every faction in the story tries to flatten into scripture. She springs her pregnancy on Theo in a barn full of cows, lets the tableau land, then punctures it with a grin and a virgin-birth joke. The film knows exactly what image it is painting, and it lets her laugh first.

The center is thinner than the circumference, and it is fair to say so. Theo’s grief for his dead son runs on shorthand, one photograph on Jasper’s table and one wordless look, and Owen’s stubble is asked to carry backstory the script never dramatizes. Kee, for all of Ashitey’s pushback, still spends long stretches as sacred cargo, ferried and fought over, her interior life the one margin this endlessly attentive camera never wanders into. The film indicts every faction for treating her as a symbol and never entirely kicks the habit itself. And when the symbolism gets loud, it gets loud: the rescue vessel is named Tomorrow, in case the fog was too subtle. There is a dissent worth taking seriously, that all this adds up to spectacle, misery staged for virtuosity. I think it collapses on the evidence of the style itself: the dirty lens, the overcast light, the framing that credits every extra with a life the plot cannot spend. But the thin center is real. It is conceded, and it is priced in.

Everything rests on the ending, which may be the most honestly earned in this century’s science fiction. A rowboat in fog. A wounded man teaching a new mother how to burp her child, gently, gently, while his own blood pools unmentioned at his feet. Kee tells him the name she has chosen: Dylan, the name of Theo’s dead boy. It is a girl’s name too, she says. Then the buoy, the fog, and the trawler coming out of the gray like a rumor made of steel, Tomorrow painted on the hull. Take the image at its word. A boat arrives on schedule because two dead women and two dead men kept an appointment. Hope here is not optimism, which is a mood. It is fidelity, which is a practice. The war restarted ninety seconds after the ceasefire. The baby is still on the water. Both things are true, and Children of Men is the great film of its era because it never once asks you to pick just one.