The Mirrormaze attempts film criticism

恭喜發財!

Last night we all watched a movie in one of Ruthi's movie nights, with wonderful snacks and company. In the past Ruthi showed us such classics as The Godfather and Annie Hall, which are too sacred for us mortals to critique. But this time we saw a movie that none of us had heard of before -- Children of Men, and on our way back through the snowdrifts of Cambridge we compared notes. Each of us saw the same movie, and, surprisingly, each of us saw more or less the same things in the movie. But the really remarkable thing was that each came out in the end with a totally different opinion of what the movie was about, and whether or not it was "good". I hated it (cheesy and moralizing), Yasha saw a cute, enjoyable scifi and Hannah gave it the highest praise I've heard her give a movie -- "it's not fake".

"Children of Men" is a dystopia based on a story by P.D. James. It's the future and everything sucks, in the "Republicans took over and now it's the end of the world" sort of way. Human meddling with the environment has caused universal infertility so the youngest person alive is 18 years old, and the British government (the one surviving government on Earth, we're told), has become a xenophobic, totalitarian farce. Non-citizens ("fugies") are put in cages and shipped off to Nazi-like refugee camps where they're starved to death, and except for nationalist propaganda the one advertisement we see is for "quietus", the perfected suicide drug (an amazing name, by the way). The protagonist gets involved in a rebel organization run by his ex-wife, and unwittingly gets drawn into an intrigue involving the miracle that no one dares to expect any more -- Kee, a pregnant (fugee) woman.

All three of us noticed three things. A: the movie is cheesy. The premise is a trope (an overused and somewhat forced interpolation between modern imperialism and nazis). There is a lot of cliche-ing going on ("Life is determined by chance -- no, it's all for a purpose" is actually a line of dialogue, repeated at least thrice). Key points of the backstory are announced on propoganda slides ("there are no more babies/the rest of the world is in chaos/only England remains"). Hell, there's even a tattered gypsy guiding the protagonists to a boat. B: the movie is highly dramatic. Everyone who can possibly die does so, in the most heartrending way possible. Every pause in the dialogue is predictably interrupted by gunfire or a car chase. Much of the movie has to do with babies: dying, crying and laughing (in that order). And yet, finally, C: the people in the movie are depicted lovingly and realistically. No one (except possibly the main character) is pure hollywood. No one magically knows where to go or what to do; the bad guys aren't all bad; the actresses aren't all hot and, there's not even a single romance!

All of us noticed these things, but we weighted them totally differently. I saw overdramaticized politics and a questionably logical premise, and my mind was set in the first few minutes of the film; I knew it'll be preachy and take itself too seriously. So I turned on my inner critic, and saw that it was preachy and took itself too seriously. Point B above I interpreted as pandering to cheap emotion instead of developing any real psychological content. Point C I saw as a small redeeming quality, but nowhere near enough to redeem the rest of the film. (That, and bad acting). Yasha had lower expectations. He thought of the movie as an action thriller/sci-fi. He liked the action, liked the story (which was, in all honesty, pretty good), and he said that though he noticed it's cheesy, he was moved by the plot. And as for Hannah, she was ok with the events being overdramatized for a different reason. The important part for her was that it depicted people honestly and didn't do the Hollywood thing of making people behave like they're expected in fiction rather than as they do in real life. She made an interesting analogy with grocery stores. Hannah gets food at Harvest and doesn't like going to Whole Foods. She says they arrange all the labels as you'd think they should, and try to make you feel good and righteous about buying them. But at less pretentious stores like Costco, they might have grandiose proportions and arrange stuff to make you get what you want, but they don't try to give you any sort of false idea of what you're buying and who you are: in other words, they don't lie to you. Most movies, she said, are like Whole foods and make characters into something either Hollywoodish or "refined", whereas this one is more like Costco, and makes people into just people.

We all came to the movie with different expectations -- both from movies as a whole, and from the genre we assigned this one -- and based our opinion on whether these expectations were fulfilled or not (or, in Hannah's case, overfulfilled). This brings back a favorite quote of my mom's, which she says is from Aristotle: "a masterpiece is a work that does it best in the conventions of its form". I still maintain that Children of Men is a cheesy action flick which takes itself too seriously (and whatever Hannah says about Costco, when you buy three giant trays of croissants, one is bound to go moldy) -- but I think I have a much richer experience after hearing Yasha and Hannah's points of view. And I can see myself, on a different night, in a different mood -- watching this movie and staying up all night because of its tragedy and beauty (certain scenes are very beautiful -- there are, as Mike pointed out, a couple of takes which last upwards of 10 minutes). Such, I guess, is the mystery of human nature.