The title of this post is sort of tongue-in-cheek, as Atonement and Children of Men have little in common except for being populated with British actors and being adaptations of books I haven't read. But there's another superficial thing they share, and I'll get to that later in my post.

While Atonement is likely to get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, I thought it was generally a failure. It started promising enough, and I found the English countryside scenes that make up the first half of the movie compelling, even though I knew what was going to happen from the trailer. (Although I didn't know the details, and those turned out to be more interesting than the trailer implied.)

But after that, the film switches gears and becomes an oh-the-horror-of-war picture, anchored by a 5 1/2 minute long tracking shot of the British Army's evacuation of Dunkirk that has been heralded by critics and the press as a classic shot of cinema. For a good chunk of the second half, I found myself becoming restless as the movie strayed from its earlier tone and became unmoored.

I'm generally a fan of long tracking shots, but the one in Atonement -- while an impressive technical feat even with digital enhancements -- lends no emotional impact to the film. To pull out all stops on a segment whose importance is secondary to the main themes of the film is a little strange, and to me off-putting; I would have rather watched a long shot through the gardens of the English manor during significant moments earlier in the film.

This is where my superficial comparison to Children of Men comes in: Alfonso Cuarón's masterpiece was also hyped by the media for its long takes, but that movie uses those shots wisely in service to the larger themes, and major character and plot developments occur during them. It elevated substance and style at the same time.

But back to Atonement: when the film reintroduces Briony, who has some serious atoning to do, I was once again swept into the story. And the film's ending, which was rather clever and I imagine straight from Ian McEwan's novel, makes a rather noble attempt to justify the plodding middle part of the movie. But without getting into the details, it does the exact opposite: it lessens even more the importance of the separated star-crossed lovers who dominate the war scenes, as it becomes clearer to the viewer that the entire movie is about Briony and her titular amends.

My guess is that McEwan's novel suffers less from this problem, probably by virtue of his prose and the avoidance of the cinema's demands for time compression. And I doubt his Dunkirk set piece suffers from out-of-place pyrotechnics. (But who knows, maybe he wrote the scene in iambic pentameter.) Unfortunately, the screen adaptation isn't pushing the book to the top of my to-read pile.

The movie felt like it was pushing all the right Oscar-buttons, from its sweeping typewriter soundtrack to its lush cinematography, but having seen it I wonder about its chances for the big prize. But then what will take the traditionally poorly doled-out prize? Juno? No Country for Old Men? Those are guaranteed noms, but don't seem like traditional winners. For the first time in a while, I feel like the prize is up in the air.

While Children of Men is by no means flawless, it is one of the few films I've seen in from 2006 that is clearly the product of a masterful director -- Mexico's Alfonso Cuarón.¹ I loved Y tu mamá también and find his Harry Potter entry to be the best so far in the series, but with Children of Men he enters the territory of classic sci-fi films such as Brazil and 12 Monkeys: the near-future dystopia.

The dystopic premise -- a world where for unknown reasons no child has been born in 18 years and where only Britain has maintained a semblance of civilization as we know it now by means of a fascist and sometimes genocidal government -- is handled with such realism that it's almost alarming. We're not talking here about robot armies or advanced Big Brother technologies; these are broken versions of the very political situations we read about every day, the logical extension of terrorism and insurrection when precipitated by an apocalyptic disease. I won't say more about this dystopic world, except to say that the story both flourishes and, in the end, finds its flaws in how the main characters live in it.

But the premise is not where I found Cuarón's masterful direction, because in many ways Children of Men is actually an action/war film. The two lengthy single-shot sequences² have already been much ballyhooed by critics, but I can only corroborate what's already been said -- these sequences aren't just an opportunity for Cuarón and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to show off, but actually add to the suspense of the action on screen. Much of the film, and especially in these sequences, comes off as balletic, with each gunshot, explosion, Clive Owen expression, spoken line, and swing of the camera precisely enacted as in the effects of a large-scale Broadway show.

It may sound contrived here, but I can only say that this technique actually enhances the realism of the scene, as opposed to the effect of the quick-cutting approach used so bluntly by most action and war films of our day. The closest comparison I can come up with is the mid-career work of Francis Ford Coppola, especially the electric first half of Apocalypse Now³ and his early-80's flop, the Las Vegas musical One from the Heart.⁴ Cuarón really is that talented.

I'd like to end with a brief mention of one of the most important building blocks for making true cinema: the car chase. Children of Men has an incredibly suspenseful car chase ranking high up with the best, and I don't think anything ever goes more than 10 miles per hour. It's the anti-Speed, and only a truly skilled director could make them this fun without resorting to pretty cars, fast cuts, and flame-riddled explosions.

Children of Men is one of the best films of 2006, and I can't wait to see what Cuarón does next.

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¹ The others were lesser films, relative to their respective pantheons, by Martin Scorsese and Darren Aronofsky, and Spike Lee's excellent Katrina documentary. (return)

² Including a ten-minute battle involving tanks, bombs, soldiers, and a chase sequence where, yes, the shot never once cuts. (return)

³ Which in my book, contains some of the finest cinematic direction in film history. (return)

⁴ Which is an incredible technical feat -- Coppola basically built downtown Las Vegas on a soundstage with an obsessively constructed lighting design -- but fails on so many other levels. (return)