Children of Men / Freedom Writers
Jan 5, 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 1
Children of Men
In a world of scarcity, cruelty is the norm. In a cruel world, kindness is difficult. In a world of scarcity, however, sometimes kindness is all we have to give. Children of Men is a movie about impossible acts of kindness.
Children of Men is about a ruined world set in the not-too-distant future of 2027. We’re never told explicitly why, but two things define this ruined world: society has broadly collapsed globally with the exception of a functional-but-hobbled fascist government in Britain, and no child has been born for 18 years. Did an ecological or man-made disaster cause both the infertility and collapse? Did the despair of global infertility cause the societal collapse? Who cares, doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re here now and things are awful.
The action of the film follows Theo (Clive Owen), a former activist turned petty bureaucrat and washed up drunk who is contacted by his ex, Julian (Julianne Moore) who needs his help in securing transit papers for a woman to get to the coast. It turns out that that woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), is the first known woman to become pregnant in the past 18 years. Her status causes the two of them to be beset on all sides as they attempt to flee to rendez-vous with a ship operated by The Human Project, an international research organization (that may not even exist) that ostensibly hopes to solve the global infertility problem.
My home media server, IMDb, and a Google search all define Children of Men’s genre as “action/thriller.” This is an understandable characterization given that it contains ample explosions, car chases, and gunfights, but it is in no way the same kind of movie as your average Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer joint. The vast majority of the action scenes of Children of Men play out in long single-take handheld shots following Theo and Kee as they perpetually escape from the dangers that surround them. This cinema verité style1 gives each of these sequences a sort of terrifying mundanity to them. In situations of extreme danger in the film (as in real life) there are no slow-motion reveals, no cuts to closeup of a steely eyed hero, no swelling score to indicate heightened emotion. We simply go from Theo and Julian joking around with each other to being shot at in a matter of seconds. We are given no warning by the standard semiotics of filmmaking. Danger just happens, and rather than being the kind of thing one excitedly eats popcorn to, it’s deeply terrifying. Director Alfonso Cuarón sets this tone of terrifying mundanity right at the beginning with a scene of Theo getting a cup of coffee before work. As he exits the cafe (and pours a slug of scotch into his cup) a bomb goes off inside out of nowhere. Do we then start following Theo as he immediately runs for his life and is being chased in a thrilling action sequence? No. He goes to work. Life in a warzone sometimes means you just have to go to work after the bomb goes off.
The terrifying mundanity of the violence of the film is only part of its larger world building. Cuarón shows the audience an England that’s in steep decline by deft use of set design. The streets of London are filled with cobbled-together tuktuks and cars with mismatched body panels. Clothing is a little worse for wear than someone’s social status might otherwise dictate.2 Announcements on buses remind us using familiar PSA language that harboring refugees (commonly called “foogies” through the film) is a crime, and that government assisted euthanasia (branded “Quietus” in a package that looks identical to allergy medication) is always available to anyone who wants it. Crucially, there is trash everywhere. Cuarón, a Mexico City native, told his fellow Chilango set designers for all of their location shots to “make it look more Mexican.” It’s kind of a pity that the way to make a familiar-looking London look like it’s in a fallen world is to throw a coat of Mexico on it, but that is the world in which we live.
The power of Children of Men creating this overarching and pervading sense of dread, decay, and danger is that it makes acts of love feel all the more powerful. Every time Theo puts his own safety and life at risk feels like a herculean effort because we’re constantly shown how the default action has become cruelty. People casually walk past foogies in cages. No one seems to react when Theo is disappeared into a van by terrorists. The only way to carry on is expressed by Theo’s cousin Nigel: “I just don’t think about it.” By dropping the viewers into the middle of this dystopia we see what happens to a populace of frogs in a slowly boiling pot of water. While we’re horrified the characters simply shrug, making Theo’s simple act of kindness and hope a heroic gesture.
Children of Men is suffused with Christian imagery. The very title comes from a Bible verse (Psalm 90:3 of the King James Version: "Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men"). The terrorist group that supports the rights of refugees are the “Fishers” (Matthew 14:9 / Mark 1:17 “Come with me and I will make you fishers of men”). Every character who reacts to Kee’s pregnancy does so by either exclaiming “Jesus Christ” or making the sign of the cross, and Cuarón is constantly using visual language that signifies Theo and Kee as being a modern Mary and Joseph.
Christianity is, at its core, a religion founded on a singular act of massively difficult love and kindness. I do not believe in Christianity theologically, but I do very much believe in its core principle that acts of selfless kindness and grace are among the greatest acts that humans can achieve. As of January 2025 society may not yet have collapsed and we still have babies, but the state of the world isn’t magnificent either. We can all stand to be reminded that the world calls to us to perform acts of love and kindness, even when they’re difficult.
Rating: ★★★★★ A masterpiece. If a rep house is screening it near you, run, don’t walk to see it.
Economics: On the January 5th weekend chart, its first weekend of wide release, Children of Men grossed $10.2 million, just behind The Pursuit of Happyness and just ahead of Freedom Writers. It would go on to make $70 million at the worldwide box office with an additional $24.5 million in DVD sales on a $76 million budget. While it was released on limited screens on Christmas 2006 for awards considerations and purposes it would only be nominated for three Oscars: Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and Editing.
Harold Number3: 0.08
Most Inspired Casting: Michael Caine as Jasper, a former political cartoonist turned off-the-grid cannabis cultivator. After more than a decade of Caine playing genteel avuncular types in movies like The Cider House Rules (1999) and Batman Begins (2005) it is delightful to see Caine return to his roots as a charming dirtbag a la Alfie (1966) and The Italian Job (1969). Spoilers: Jasper dies in the film, and his last words are “pull my finger.” May we all depart this mortal coil with such grace.
Freedom Writers
Being Hillary Swank in 2007 must’ve been a tough gig. On the one hand, you have two Best Actor Oscars at 33. That’s the same amount Meryl Streep had by her age, one more than Danel Day-Lewis had by that age, and two more than Al Pacino had at the same age after being in The Godfather (1972) and Serpico (1973). Being that lauded that fast put her in among the ranks of some of the greatest actors who have appeared on camera. It also, however, puts on the pressure to keep it up and to keep appearing in high quality and meaningful motion pictures. Playing an inspirational figure in a movie based on a true story might seem that it’s a safe bet for “high quality” and “meaningful.” I can only imagine that this is what enticed her to sign onto something like Freedom Writers.
Freedom Writers is the story of Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank), a young chipper teacher from the affluent Orange County city of Newport Beach with big dreams of making a difference in childrens’ lives despite the fact that her father (played by a grouchy Scott Glenn) and husband (played by Patrick Dempsey as a human monster) think she’s wasting her talents. Her story is played against the story of Eva (played by April Hernandez Castillo), a Latina girl from Long Beach City with a chip on her shoulder after her father was falsely accused and sent to prison over a gang slaying. They meet on opposite sides of the school desk in a freshman English class at Long Beach’s Woodrow Wilson High where the students respect neither Ms. G nor each other. Despite never ceasing to be a corny white lady, Ms. G eventually gets through to the students, teaching them that by the power of writing and finding their own voice they can not only respect each other, but themselves.
On its face, Freedom Writers is boilerplate inspirational teacher fare along the lines of Stand and Deliver (1988) and Finding Forrester (2000) with some “corny teacher gains respect from rowdy students” flavor a la Dangerous Minds (1995) and Blackboard Jungle (1955). It stands out from those films, though, in that it’s based on a true story. Erin Gruwell was a real teacher at Woodrow Wilson High who published some of the diaries written by her students as a volume called The Freedom Writers Diary. Unfortunately, the fact that there’s a real Ms. G and real students who wrote these diaries that the stories in the movie are based on turns a bad movie into an even worse one. Since finishing the film, I took some time to learn about the real Ms. G and the students whose work was collected into The Freedom Writers Diary, and the 30 years since she first set foot into the classroom reveals that her work did matter very much to these students, specifically because she taught them to speak up and find their own voice. The problem with the film Freedom Writers isn’t that it’s a movie about rowdy kids finding their own voice. The problem is that the kids finding their own voice is an afterthought when it should be the primary focus of the film. Freedom Writers is instead a saccharine portrait of a fictional saint with a kids-finding-their-voice subplot.
The first time I felt my chest relax from the pure cringe of the saintly Ms. G trying to break through to the kids was a montage of her reading her students’ diaries for the first time and seeing each of their individual experiences. The film uses real diary writings from the book for these portions. While it focuses more on the writing about how hard life is in the hood rather than, say, their writing about body image issues, or their parents’ disapproval of their romantic relationships, or their political activism in opposing California’s Proposition 187, the film comes alive in this moment of depicting real kids and their real struggles before cutting back to Swank as Erin Gruwell arguing with her husband. The thing that the film is telling us (without showing us) is that the voices and experiences of these kids matter deeply, which only makes it all the more jarring when it chooses to move its focus away from them and back towards Ms. G's white savior narrative. Even Ms. G’s foil Eva barely has a coherent story. Where every one of Ms. G’s various travails and triumphs are spelled out very clearly, Eva’s story of her own struggle after witnessing someone she knows committing a murder is barely developed, to the point where her bravely accusing the killer in a courtroom near the end of the film comes as a surprise to the audience. “Oh right. She saw someone shoot a guy” should not be my reaction to what is played as a climactic moment of moral triumph.
I do not begrudge the real Erin Gruwell for how the film depicts her, but the fact that the film never shows her faltering, making mistakes, or even being visibly tired or exasperated simply serves to spotlight how much this is a fake version of a real person. The film tells us that Erin Gruwell works three jobs to pay for the extra resources needed to realize her vision of how to teach her students, and we never see her feeling burned out. The closest thing to it is her walking into her home and announcing that she’s tired before her uncaring husband announces he’s leaving her. Ms. G is beset on all sides by her fellow educators, who hate her for no other reason than how much she cares (especially brilliant in this role is Imelda Staunton —anticipating her turn in seven months when she would play Dolores Umbridge— as senior teacher Margaret Campbell, who clashes with Erin by telling her that *gasp* her scheme to continue teaching the same class through all four years of high school violates the teacher’s union contract.)
Her husband announces he’s leaving her, not because of the fact that he likely hardly ever sees her as she’s working her three jobs, but because he feels threatened by the potential of her students. The real Erin Gruwell quit teaching after a few years, doubtless impacted by burnout of dealing with the scant resources available to an American public school teacher, a decision that was doubtless hard and gut wrenching to make, but we don’t even get a hint of that in the film. The fictional Erin Gruwell is only capable of being disappointed by her fellow adults, never capable of disappointing anyone herself. No human has ever been as good as Hillary Swank as Erin Gruwell.
Beyond de-centering the very students that the Freedom Writers Diaries seeks to center, the depiction of this unbelievably saintly fictional Erin Gruwell turns what could have been a nuanced and fascinating performance by one of America’s great talents of the screen into something flat and uninteresting. Once I’m done composing this essay I doubt I’ll ever think about Freedom Writers ever again, which is truly a pity, as sitting down to watch this one of my first thoughts was "oh right, Hilary Swank is a really good actor, this might be really good." Unfortunately it wasn’t.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆. Not great. Rewatching the 4th season of The Wire is a better use of your time if you’re looking for something about the interiority of at-risk school kids and how difficult being a public school teacher is. Also better use of Robert Wisdom.
Economics: Freedom Writers opened to #4 at the box office on the weekend chart of Jan 5 2007 behind Children of Men and ahead of Dreamgirls, grossing $9.4 million, eventually grossing $42 million worldwide with an additional $22 million in DVD sales on a $21 million budget
Harold Number: 0.15
Best Outfit: Pat Caroll as Nazi resistance figure Miep Gies with a wonderfully understated classic suit.
Cuarón has said that the action scenes were directly inspired by how gunfights are depicted in the documentary The Battle of Algiers (1966)
My personal favorite detail here is Theo’s ragged and worn London 2012 Olympics hoodie. The 2012 London Olympics had been announced but not yet happened. For us here in the future it’s the most natural thing in the world to own a ratty old sweatshirt from 13 years ago but in 2007 it was an inspired bit of art direction. The opposite of retro-futurism, projected rattiness maybe?
An invention of my friend Paul Babinski, a “harold” is a measure of age appropriateness in cinematic couples. 1 harold is defined as the difference in age between Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude (1971)