From Book to Movie, Part III: A Review of THE CHILDREN OF MEN

I think Al hit the nail on the head with his comment: only bad books seem to improve in their film versions.  Good books--which, thankfully for me, are legion!--almost never get better on screen.  And here's a case in point: P.D. James's astonishing novel The Children of Men.

I have been a fan of James's detective fiction since college, so I was intrigued when my friend Lauren Winner loaned me a copy of this 1992 sleeper at AAR last year.  (Lauren, if you're reading this, I do intend to return the book to you.)  Some aspects of the story are certainly what we expect from James: the careful, detached but dead-on observations about human behavior, the peerless vocabulary.  But the subject matter is a radical departure from her detective fiction.

The first half of the novel is the first-person diary entries of Theo, a pompous Oxford don who is plying his historian's trade even as he writes his journal entries: no one, he knows, will be around to read them in the future.  It's 2021 and the human race is dying, felled by a global infertility pandemic.  Since there have been no live births since 1995, British society is in a quiet turmoil, with a government that wishes to appear benign but is actually a steely dictatorship run by Theo's cousin.  Theo records all the quotidian details of his isolated life in this society, where depression and suicide are commonplace and people negotiate custody settlements about their pets, who have come to replace children in human affections.

Theo's sober life is interrupted by Julian, an idealistic young woman who seeks his help getting an audience with the government to hear grievances about the underside of this government's policies.  Without giving away much more of the plot, suffice it to say that Julian has an especially compelling reason for wanting to ensure a just society for the future, and when Theo learns her motivations, he is finally galvanized to begin living the life he has so far only been recording.  The second half of the novel is more traditionally James, with third-person narration and a fast-moving plot.  Theo is a participant, even a leader, and not merely an observer.

It's the second half, of course, that provides the guns-blazing trajectory of the movie.  Whereas in the book, outright war is kept just at bay by the government's uber-British concerns for civilized conduct, the film misses that tightrope walk entirely, degenerating into shoot-em-up action to compensate for its lack of finesse.  To say that the film lacks subtlety is a violent understatement. 

What was so chilling about the book is this future society's inherent plausibility. I could easily picture the dystopia James created because it was such a logical extension of the way things are now: in the book, the infertility crisis only exposes fissures that are already evident around issues like immigration, class struggle, and fear of aging.  The movie, which should have been helped by strong performances by Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, prefers to depict an all-out war zone.

Book: A

Movie: D