25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #24 - CHILDREN OF MEN

24. Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006)

Using an Eastern European long take aesthetic, a Mexican director situates a British novelist’s science fiction tale about an African refugee -- whose pregnancy is humanity’s first in almost two decades – within the contexts of U.S. anti-immigration fervor and War on Terror atrocities. That Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is terrifically entertaining without sacrificing an inch of its political breadth is something of a miracle. In collaboration with the great director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot Malick’s The New World), Cuaron uses a series of frenzied long takes to create a zippy cousin to Bela Tarr’s forsaken glacial drifts, but it could be said both are charting historical degradation of a sort. In Cuaron's film, a gun-phobic former radical, the droll Clive Owen, escorts the planet's lone fertile human (the race's sterility is never explained, though numerous potential culprits populate the narrative) through a looking glass of squalid immigrant detention and urban warfare in an effort to get her unborn child to The Human Project, a team of scientists hoping to repopulate the dying earth. It’s an art film and an action picture: a nightmarish chase picture set in a barren future of nearly unremitting xenophobia, war, paranoia and fascism. Cuaron should be forgiven an occasionally condescending approach to both race and radicalism and applauded for an attempt at drawing parallels between domestic (immigration law, class conflicts) and foreign policies (the war on terror, preemptive strikes). Aesthetically, Children of Men boasts the greatest, most haunting sci-fi production design and photography since Blade Runner. Despite its prognosticated bleakness, the film is anything but cynical: after a decade of apocalyptic action films in which humanity must survive its own ravages, Cuaron’s vision is the only one that elects to preserve earnestly the hope that not only will human bodies weather future cataclysm, but that a shared sense of Humanity might as well.

VISIONARILY

Zach Galifianakis plays a Visioneer in Visioneers

People across the United States are exploding at ever alarming numbers. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. Dreaming and weight gain are symptoms. Best to be a good, productive employee in order to avoid stress-induced combustion. Also have lots of sex (occasionally with giant stuffed teddy bears, but mostly with your spouse) and eat lots of fried chicken. So goes society’s best advice for leading a long, happy and healthy life in Jared Drake’s Visioneers.

A laudable effort at lo-fi sci-fi, this cheapo jet black comedy is about 5/7ths hilariously morose, and 2/7th overripe, New Age mush, ultimately not a bad proportion for first time filmmakers Jared and Brandon Drake (director and writer, respectively). Granted a last-minute DVD release after the success of this summer’s The Hangover made star Zach Galifianakis nearly a household name, Visioneers sports the standard dystopian sci-fi line about a horizonless corpo-governmental bureaucracy stifling the life force of its drone employees until one man decides he’s not going to take it anymore.

Visioneers’ addition to the canon of futuristic office drone cautionary tales is the absurdist sense of humor it utilizes while installing what is among the ugliest futures yet contrived in contemporary science fiction. These United States, date undetermined, as conjured by the brothers Drake, seem to have taken two steps backward and three steps sideways. Remember how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow purported a future as projected from the 1930’s? Visioneers offers us a vision of a dystopian future as suburban teenagers might have imagined it in 1993. This tack by no means hinders the effectiveness of the Drake’s vision, as it easily could have. Instead, the oddball humor and anachronistic non-sequiturs liven up the whole thing. George Washington Winsterhammerman (Galifianakis) drives, despite only having one child, a boxy early 90s minivan, lives in a garish McMansion, wears track suits sporting his company’s logo, employs a personal trainer/life coach in the mold of both Tony Robbins and Jake Steinfeld (Body by Jake) and his office contains no computers or electronic gizmos. This is naked, unplugged misery, and it definitely smarts worse than the whizzing and whirring malaise of technocratic masterpieces like Blade Runner and A.I. Fittingly, when the evil institution rotting the American Dream from the belly out wants to corral its citizens into less emotional behavior and increase productivity, it attaches a gaudy, pager-looking device to the jugular. There’s no virtual reality, robotic maids, retinal scans, or techno-wizardry of any kind, as if the human race grew so emotionally stunted and unimaginative that the will to create distractions from the numbing cosmos had withered altogether. Television alone persists, and there isn’t much on it but vapid self-helpers (1000 Ways to be Happy), explosion cure telethons, sadistic cop shows (Mack Luster, in which the police pry the fingernails from an uncooperative geriatric) and newscasts manufacturing fear of spontaneous combustion. If all that sounds a bit obvious, the understated execution is nearly flawless, elevating the material beyond its satirical brethren.

Perhaps the brothers had the screenplay and art design lying around the house for a few years while gathering financing. Regardless, this vision is all the more horrifying in its post-modern chaos of life. A running joke is the widespread fear of chaos (pronounced CHAY-ohss by all character in the film), without any acknowledgment of the current maelstrom of products, pacification and ugliness that surrounds them already. There is no center to this universe, no organizing principal or isolatable point where humanity went astray. This world’s relationship to our own is entirely nonlinear. We didn’t evolve or devolve toward this destination; the Drakes present it as radial explosion of twenty years worth of junk culture and capitalistic excess.

Galifianakis is mesmerizing. Toned down tremendously from his turn in The Hangover and his standup act, he shows remarkable range as George, and the Drakes wisely linger over his expressions, which are never cheap or easy to read. The emotionless sad sack is practically mute, and the film’s most biting, hilarious and wrenching stretches occur watching Galifianakis as a single word spends minutes being visibly generated in his neck and on his face before limply slipping out. He wears the weight of a forsaken society on his broad face better than any of his deprogrammed forebears. The tension he generates after failing to speak when prompted is reason enough to take in this fantastically bizarre and admirably cheap sci-fi romp. Of particular brilliance is an extended scene where he flings himself through his property in a saccadic, pre-explosive fit, his gesticulations tight spasms punctuated by uncontrolled flailing. It’s a bit of pantomime that’s unique to Galifianakis, and it, along with his droll line readings and sly facial tics, signals a significant comedic performer emerging into his own.

Not as dramatically together as Idiocracy, but far funnier. Not as brilliant as Brazil, but far more intimate a portrait of the little man’s suffering in a futuristic wasteland. Mentioning it in league with those two films should give a clear indication of its merits, while stirring up anticipation for the future work of both Galifianakis and the Drake brothers.

Visioneers / USA / 2008 / Color / 95 min. / Directed by Jared Drake / Written by Brandon Drake / Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Judy Greer, James Le Gros, Mia Maestro and Missi Pyle