3 Things...

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... that came to mind watching Children of Men for the third time (see my original thoughts on the film here) last evening (warning - spoilers lie here!):

1 - The opening sequence, with the cafe explosion, makes me cry every single time I see it. In fact, I think it affects me worse the more times I see it. That the film can open with such a visceral gut-punch of an image - honestly, the shot of that woman holding her own arm is as seared into my brain as the real-life Abu Ghraib images the film swipes later on - and still manage to keep its audience from tuning it out - notice how the sound of Theo's ears ringing carries over well into the next scene - is a testament to the strength, the confidence, of vision that Cuaron had here.

2 - Clive Owen's performance only gets richer the more times you watch the film. I thought he was wonderful the first two times in the theater, but watching the film on DVD throws the performances front and center and Owen's Theo is an utterly convincing portrayal of a man frayed apart by his history and his present. As more horrors get heaped upon him through the course of the film you can see Owen's eyes scrambling in shock, trying to reason why he has been thrown into this position and what more he can possibly stand. But at the same time Owen lets you see that Theo is not the hollowed-out husk of a person he tries to present himself as, and that he does indeed still care deeply - too deeply - about maybe, after all this horror, ekeing out something meaningful. And Owen does all this without once feeling like he's trying to grab your attention - there is no clip for the awards shows to have centered in on (not that they could have been bothered). Just an awesome, unshowy performance.

3 - The death of Julianne Moore's character works for many of the same reasons that Janet Leigh's did in Psycho - the audience still doesn't expect one of the stars or the film to buy the farm so early. I'd say that Cuaron twists this knife even deeper - or at least knew he had to make the shock more pronounced 45 years after Psycho - by casting a great and capable capitol-A Actress like Moore in a role that she's barely given any opportunity to fill in any of the blanks on before this early exit. Who is Julian? We learn more about her after she's dead than Moore's given to work with while onscreen. And I don't - obviously - see that as a weakness of the film, but quite the opposite - I think it was done on purpose, and makes the trauma of her murder all the more unnerving.
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