Thursday, January 25, 2007
Cuaron:missing the point.
Allow me to add a quote about Children of Men--it's actually the last paragraph of the review I linked to in my last post...
...Even though I very much enjoyed the film, I think this paragraph puts it nicely:
Indeed, in a film from which all Christian referents have been systematically erased, the title itself, The Children of Men — a direct quotation from Psalm 90, a prayer in the burial service for the dead — is stripped of all symbolic resonance. It means nothing more than what it says. Yet, in the book, the recovery of the meaning of childbirth is inseparable from the discomfiting symbol of the cross. Cuaron’s thesis about our declining ability to read and interpret symbols is sadly confirmed in his own failure to come to terms with a book whose complex symbolism escapes the limits of his own imagination — an imagination deformed by Hollywood’s apolitical correctness.
...Even though I very much enjoyed the film, I think this paragraph puts it nicely:
Indeed, in a film from which all Christian referents have been systematically erased, the title itself, The Children of Men — a direct quotation from Psalm 90, a prayer in the burial service for the dead — is stripped of all symbolic resonance. It means nothing more than what it says. Yet, in the book, the recovery of the meaning of childbirth is inseparable from the discomfiting symbol of the cross. Cuaron’s thesis about our declining ability to read and interpret symbols is sadly confirmed in his own failure to come to terms with a book whose complex symbolism escapes the limits of his own imagination — an imagination deformed by Hollywood’s apolitical correctness.
