This humble blog is not the first to comment on the notable differences between P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men and the blow-‘em-up cuss fest movie version written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Mark Steyn has written repeatedly (see here, here, here, and here). Steyn has made well known his strenuous objections to Cuarón’s overly imaginative take on James’s thought-provoking novel. Elsewhere, Anthony Sacramone gives insightful observations about how Cuarón’s attempt compares with other adaptations—and how it falls short.
It’s a mystery why Cuarón used The Children of Men as a springboard for his political allegory. The global barrenness is nothing more than a plot device, setting the stage for some action sequences. In James’s dark vision, man is much more causal in his annihilation through sterility. A gradual undermining of the procreative end results in a society that is no longer interested in the once constrained act. Where in the movie universe, sterility just happens, in the book people contribute, however unwittingly, to their undoing.
The character of Theo Faron is unrecognizable from the book to the movie. One is a restrained, aloof academic, the other a foul-mouthed, apathetic bureaucrat. One delicately sips claret, willing himself to habits of refinement while mixing his own salad dressing, while the other takes a swig from a flask stashed in his coat pocket any chance he gets.
Interestingly, it is the Cuarón’s oafish character who has no part in his undoing. His marriage fails, ever so understandably, after his child dies through an illness that could not have been prevented. Faron in the book is much more devious. His cool refinement is the death knell for his marriage, already strained by his direct involvement in his child’s accidental death. The character in the book is so much more enjoyable to spend time with, what with his probing psychological musings, carefully curated tastes, and biting commentary. Yet, the Faron in the book is morally culpable for his suffering in a way that the slovenly Faron of the movie is not.
In James’s Faron there is a struggle between his self-interest and a seemingly sincere desire or inbred impulse for civility. This is a man who wastes precious minutes untying an elderly woman he is robbing so that she can avail herself of the lavatory and not suffer the indignity of soiling the bed next to her spouse. It’s such a fascinating juxtaposition of inclinations, the incomprehensibility of refined manners in a world that is coming apart. Faron in the movie is a bit more the lumbering action hero of few facial expressions and even fewer words.
Comically, Cuarón recasts the character of Julian as Faron’s ex-wife in the movie. She is, absurdly, the leader of an anarchic terrorist cell demanding the humane treatment of refugees. Women rarely lead movements of anarchy because anarchy is not the total absence of order; it is, in the end, the reestablishment of rule by the strongest. Julian, depicted as a lithe, manicured pixie woman would not be long at the helm of a motley crew of anti-government crusaders on the verge of extinction. She doesn’t remain in power long, so we can throw Cuarón a bone for accuracy there.
Where James captures poignantly the desires of an aging world, no longer consumed with the frenzied passion of a young culture but slipping into the quiet desire of a dying species, Cuarón depicts overt chemistry between Faron and his former wife. This is laughably out of place.
James’s Julian is a complex character, immediately likeable, slightly deformed, earnestly religious, and deeply flawed. Julian in the book offers a believable female presence: brave but not courageous, she is willing to risk everything for her child whom she rightly sees as a gift from God. Kee, the mother in the movie, is a two-dimensional stand-in for oppressed people. She has no compelling backstory and no comprehension of the gift she stumbled upon.
The film does not offer a sense of the hostile land outside the increasingly sequestered urban centers of comfort. The book provides an eerie panorama of a nation collapsing on itself, country villages aging and depopulating. In this world, government sponsored suicide is much more accurately portrayed as a coercive measure to ensure that the limited urban resources of the surviving are not jeopardized by the burden of caring for the aged. The movie features suicide as a nice, free-will option to die while listening to chill music. That’s not how state-sponsored killing tends to play out in the real world.
The most stark contrast in character vision comes with Jasper. The movie portrays the most insufferable, green-loving, long-haired, self-less caregiver hippie, so saccharine as to be totally beyond belief. In the character of Jasper, James captures the self-preserving egoism of the cultured and the godless. The universal sterility of the human race does not bother Jasper, an Oxford don; he tells Farron, “It doesn’t worry me particularly. I’m not saying I hadn’t a moment of regret when I first knew Hilda was barren; the genes asserting their atavistic imperatives, I suppose. On the whole I’m glad; you can’t mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway.” How much like the Boomers relishing their dog grandchildren and lamenting the state of the planet does Jasper sound?
Separated from the great unwashed masses on his compound, Jasper informs Faron, “I intend that my life shall be comfortable, and, when it no longer is, then I shall wash down my final pill with a bottle of claret.”
The Jasper of the film is so groovy it’s hard to imagine him having the wherewithal to sequester adequate supplies and rig the security. Sadly, Jasper offers the most eloquent philosophical discourse in the film. As Sacramone writes, “He also engages in what passes for theological reflection in these apocalyptic times: a meaningless juxtaposition of ‘faith’ and ‘chance’ that is supposed to be penetrating in its flippancy but only betrays the banality of both the character and the film.” Cuarón’s subversion of the misanthropic Oxford intellectual in favor of a Berkley pothead is unspeakably disappointing.
James’s most haunting lines are about the old, abandoned by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who should be alive, left to their own devices to muddle through to the end. Where Jasper’s hippie/journalist wife in the film is heroically crippled from undisclosed fascist government torture, James’s version of Jasper and Hilda depicts her as a fellow academic. Her senility is of unknown origin, and, as Faron observes, may be nothing more than an expression of existential lethargy. Of course, an aging society would focus resources on curing the diseases of old age, long ago solving the enigma of Alzheimer’s and other maladies of the old. Faron observes, “But there are other kinds of senility which even our obsessive scientific concern with the problems of ageing has still been unable to alleviate. Perhaps she is just old, just tired, just sick to death of me. I suppose, in old age, there is an advantage in retreating into a world of one’s own, but not if the place one finds is hell.”
That’s the kicker. We’ve, by choice, avoided having children, convincing ourselves that our selfishness is virtue, our purity is too important to the planet. Like the twice-married infertile couples in their twilight years of childbearing who say tearfully that they would do anything to have a child, James’s world is filled with those who despise their condition but fail to see the role they have played in creating it.
The characters of Cuarón’s movie adaptation reveal some of the very cultural blind spots that are steering us on the course that James predicts.
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