I assure you this is a 'Children of Men' review

I used to be the sort of person who would say, “This is a book everyone should read,” but I am no longer that person. I don’t know when I changed, or what did it exactly, because I didn’t even fully realize I had changed until recently. I was reading the introduction to Nick Hornby’s “Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt,” a collection of the essays he writes for a magazine called The Believer about what he reads each month. He writes about the decline of reading as a part of the culture, but doesn’t blame TV or movies or computers. Instead he blames readers and English teachers and the sort of people who would say, “This is a book everyone should read.”

Literature, Hornsby says – and I find that I agree with him – is all too often presented not as a pleasure activity, but as a responsibility, as something that’s good for you. But we humans don’t generally like things that are good for us; we think of healthy food as being food that doesn’t taste good, and the doctor as someone who sticks us with needles, and literature as incomprehensible and pointless metaphors for who knows what. This is a problem.

No one says you should watch The Sopranos because it’s good for you – we say you should watch The Sopranos because it’s just a damn good TV show. That it happens to be better for us than, well, pretty much any reality TV program is entirely subordinate to the fact that it’s also just better than any reality TV program. The same thing is often true of literature. Look, I’m not trying to argue that reading John Grisham and Danielle Steele is better for you than reading Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon. What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t matter whether it’s better for you or not, because ultimately it’s better for us (book-loving people first, but broader culture, too) as a whole.

In high school I worked at a book store and for the first few weeks when a customer would come to the register with two romance novels and a copy of Us it was all I could do to mask my disgust. Jackie Collins? Steve Baldacci? How could people read that crap when they could be buying Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or, God, even an Oprah book!?! But I got over that, too. After all, for every person buying Steve Martini there were countless others not coming into our store and buying anything at all, who were probably not reading at all.

At the end, it has to be better (for literacy, for the publishing industry, for struggling writers, for everyone) if more people are reading five books a year (even if it’s Dean Koontz) than if those same people are (a) not reading at all or (b) attempting to read whatever won the National Book award because they feel like they should, like it will somehow make them better, but hating it and never finishing.

There aren’t many people who still actually complain that Pirates Of The Caribbean will make billions more than whatever movie ultimately wins Best Picture. In the case of movies (and TV, too) we accept that what is good is not always going to be popular and that what is popular can be good without being especially redeeming. The world of books will be much healthier once more people let reading for pleasure be the norm, not some sort of shameful taboo (eg, this British article about people who are supposedly embarrassed to admit they read Harry Potter and Stephen King).

So I’ve given up the “you should read this book” mantra. Reading takes far too long and can be far too painful if you’re not enjoying it. Besides, whatever qualities the book has to recommend it are going to be wholly lost on any reader who resists the project from the start.

So the question, as it relates to what I intended this blog to be about, is whether I feel the same way about movies. Last year, if I remember correctly, I wrote that you should go see Munich. To a great extent, I still really feel that way. And yet, though I own it, I’ve never made any of my friends (nor even my wife) sit down and watch it. I’ve never even suggested it. Here I think the issue of time goes out the window. While reading a book can take hours upon hours of your life, watching a movie takes two, maybe two and a half. I don’t necessarily thinks that’s too much time to ask someone to sacrifice to an important movie. The issue is still whether or not a person essentially forced into watching a movie will get any benefit from it, no matter how potentially meaningful. Last year, Syriana and Munich both left me speechless – but to anyone who doesn’t want to go along for the ride they’re just going to be two movies where things blow up and the plot’s kind of confusing.

So I’ll just say that if it’s the sort of movie that looks even mildly interesting to you, or if you’re in the mood to visit a dark world, or if you just like Alfonso Cuaron – then you should go see Children Of Men.

It is in many ways a very difficult movie to recommend because it’s a movie almost entirely without joy, with only even a tiny amount of hope. Diana said it was good but good in a Schindler’s List kind of way. She’s right, although I hesitate at the comparison because harsh as it is Children of Men was not, to me, nearly as distressing and arduous as Schindler’s List was. That it could have been and is not is one of the greatest things to recommend it, I think.

The movie could easily have been 140-150 minutes, with long stretches toward the beginning that introduce us more fully to the characters and to the futuristic (2027, I think) world in which the movie is set. Instead, you’re thrown in and you have to figure it out for yourself. The characters talk about the calamity of the world they live in, a fragments of news broadcasts fill in other details, but a lot if left unanswered and everything is a part of the plot. The movie is not two hours long and I wasn’t bored or uninterested for even a single second.

Including Children Of Men, I can only think of three movies Cuaron has made (there may be others I either haven’t seen or have forgotten) but I’m not sure there’s any director currently working who I respect more. He just makes good movies. Two (Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Children Of Men) are stories that might otherwise not particularly interest me and I don’t have a burning desire to watch either of them again, but both are lean, well-made films that don’t get boring. Of course, I think the same goes for his Harrp Potter movie (The Prisoner Of Azkaban), which is still my favorite of the series, as much for what it leaves out as anything that’s in it. The guy is brilliant (and how many directors out there can make three so wildly different kinds of movies and be so good at all of them?).

There are pleasures in Children Of Men, just not any that come from the story itself. (I’m not saying the story is bad, mind you, everything about it is good and well done. It’s just so harsh.) Clive Owen is excellent, as he pretty much always is. This is more of a good guy role than he normally takes on and it’s nice to see his strength and rage (and flaws) used for good for a change.

One of the things I was most struck by is the future world they created. It’s a mixture of modern London (remember the story is only 20 years in the future), concentration camps, the American War On Terrorism, and the gray-blue of Minority Report. It’s sci-fi, I suppose, but the world hasn’t advanced much technologically – why would it, if humanity is dying out? The still-green enclave in central London is an interesting touch, and as a contrast the refugee camp on the coast was like Black Hawk Down meets the Blitz. There’s an abandoned schoolhouse, rather late into the movie, that was to me by far the most moving realization of just how awful that world must be. Then there are almost comic touches, like the relative who has “saved” greats works of art (like the David) and now displays them in his foyer, or an inexplicable balloon pig straight off a Pink Floyd album cover.

So it’s hard to recommend the movie, to muster up any enthusiasm. It’s hard to even want to talk about it, which is about 98% of the reason I ever want people to see any movie I’ve seen. But it’s deserving of any award nomination it gets and any best of the year list it makes, and it’s definitely worth your 10 bucks and two hours.