When I was a theatre reviewer, I always used to get riled by the way so many playwrights, after killing off a main character, would always succumb to the temptation to bring them back for one final scene—more often than not to offer the surviving characters some parting words of wisdom delivered with preternatural calm, usually from behind some kind of filmy, artfully lit scrim. (This convention is so ingrained that I even used it myself in one of my own scripts.)
This unwillingness to actually let characters stay dead is starting to infect pop culture too. For instance, I’ve spent the last few days slogging through the sad final season of the espionage series Alias on DVD—now there’s a show that was completely ruined by the producers’ habit of killing off the cast and then resurrecting them a few episodes later. Perhaps aware of the increasing absurdity of their surroundings (clones! zombies! unkillable villainesses!), the actors fought back by making their performances more subdued than ever. Despite all the deaths, all the explosions, all the nefarious plotting, Alias’ status quo never changes: the show’s theme became the stoic denial of catastrophe. It’s the perfect Bush-era TV program.
Are there perfect Bush-era movies? I’m not sure, but I did go to see Children of Men last week, and saw a trailer for a Sandra Bullock thriller called Premonition, in which she plays a woman who finds herself moving between two parallel realities following the death of her husband—one in which her husband is dead and one in which he’s still alive. Apparently Bullock is able to use the information from the still-alive reality not just to solve the mystery of his death—but to prevent it from ever happening. You can’t help but be reminded of the recent thriller Déjà Vu (Denzel Washington travels back in time to rescue a woman from a terrorist bomb) or the TV show Day Break (Taye Diggs relives the same day over and over again and having to save his wife’s life each time out). In The Fountain, Hugh Jackman tries to save his wife’s life too—he may not hop around in time, but the movie sure does.
It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to see these premises as a reflection of a pervasive American mood of regret over September 11 and the war in Iraq: If only we could go back and fix everything! It’s no wonder United 93 didn’t do well at the box office—that entire movie was an exercise in foreordained conclusions, a painful reminder of the implacable inalterability of history. Director Paul Greengrass’ entire approach was designed to foil audiences’ desire for fantasy—instead of changing history, he and his crew went to painstaking lengths to recreate every little detail as accurately as possible. (I wonder: would Superman Returns have done a better job of capturing people’s imaginations if Bryan Singer had carried his homage to the Richard Donner originals even further and shown Superman saving Lois Lane by flying around the earth and turning back time?)
That’s part of what I found so amazing about Children of Men—and please don’t read any further if you plan on seeing this movie, because I’m about to give away one of its biggest surprises. Children of Men respects the finality of death. Less than half an hour into the film, there’s a stunning sequence—filmed in one virtuoso shot so complicated it defies the laws of physics—in which the car Clive Owen is riding in is attacked on a country road by a ferocious mob. (The film is set in 2027 England, and the social order has nearly collapsed now that mankind is no longer able to reproduce.) Shockingly, midway through the scene, the character played by Julianne Moore is shot in the chest and dies in Owen’s arms.
It’s almost incomprehensible. Moore gets second billing in the credits—you can’t believe they’re killing her off. It’s a moment of genuine horror: one moment she and Owen are playfully firing a Ping Pong ball back and forth into each other’s mouths, and the next she’s lying limp in the front seat, covered in blood, her mouth now slack. (Moore does the most uncannily convincing onscreen death since Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential.) For a moment, you even think it’s a trick. The film is set in the future—maybe they’ll use some kind of Alias-style cloning machine to bring her back?
Of course not. Children of Men is science fiction, but it’s set in the real world. She’s gone. And while the film ends on a redemptive note, that note is played on a very small and grim violin. Even if we found a cure for infertility, Owen says in one scene, what would be the point? The world’s too fucked up now; it’s beyond fixing.
Hmm... if that’s his attitude, maybe Owen would have been a bad choice to play James Bond after all. Saving the planet is a task better suited to the Jennifer Garners of the world. In the final season of Alias, she even gave birth to a baby in about five minutes flat.
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