A New Nativity
Now that I am trying to get back into my movie habit my daughter and I went to see Children of Men on its wide-release opening weekend. I was intrigued by the trailers on TV and the movie certainly lived up to its billing.

It is the world 20 some years from now. Fertility has stopped- the sounds of children are no longer heard in the land. As the movie opens the youngest person in the world has just died at age 18. England is a massive separation of the haves and have-nots. Immigration is all but illegal. Homeland Security does its job of keeping the peace.

Clive Owen stars as the one chosen by fate and other circumstances to help the first pregnant young lady get to safety. To do they have to break into a city-turned-immigration prison camp, avoid those trying to use the child for political purposes and war in general. Somehow or another life must find a way to go on in spite of all this. And it does.

This is a remarkable movie from the Alfonso Cuarón, the acclaimed director of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. His directorial vision is riveting and allows the possibility of life to be held in tension with the powers of death. It is a new nativity story with all the over- and undertones of hope that is in the “other” Nativity Story. You find yourself tearing up unexpectedly in the silence of a child crying. And like the Christian Nativity, it ends with the uncertainty that you would feel if you stopped reading Matthew as the Holy Family heads to Egypt.

It seems trite to call this a cautionary tale (based on a book by author P. D. James). In a world where peace and war and terror and immigration and fear are at work, perhaps it is good to raise the cautionary flags while we still can.

Hence the purpose of a good story- this is a story well done!

“The shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.”
- Anthony De Mello (HT to Noel.)