Invisible Gesticulations - Children of Walter Huston

About Children of Walter Huston

Previous Entry Children of Walter Huston Jan. 13th, 2007 @ 04:37 pm Next Entry
I think it was in The Proposition that I first noticed Danny Huston and I thought to myself, "Another interesting and talented person named Huston? Surely not another of Walter Huston's talented descendents." And yet he is--now there's Walter, John, Angelica, and Danny.

He's good at being abrupt and sort of cerebral. Aside from The Proposition, where he played an intellectual psychopathic outlaw, he was also memorable as the Austrian emperor in Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, and as a rich art collector in Children of Men.

His scene in that last movie is one of its most striking, partly because it's quiet and sort of brobdingnagianly elegant in the midst of a movie that is otherwise an impressive, breakneck exercise of overlapping Orwellian dystopia with brilliantly humanistic action sequences.

Children of Men does a marvellous job of maintaining tension without fatiguing the viewer to the point of losing herhisits suspension of disbelief. A lot of the ads compare the movie to Blade Runner, but it's not quite that good, and indeed a different sort of movie. Blade Runner may in many ways seem to be a credible glimpse of the future, but the movie's not really about trying to predict the future. Blade Runner's about existentialism and dark fantasy, while Children of Men is solidly a tale of humans reacting to the very credible future the movie creates. It's about politics and the ways in which an insurmountable and inexplicable catastrophe can produce totalitarianism through people's willingness to be led away from grim reality. In fact, in many ways, Children of Men is the movie V for Vendetta ought to have been.

In their rush to create anti-Bush propaganda, the makers of the V for Vendetta movie missed the comic book's message about humanity's fear of deadly chaos driving it to create a firm system of Knowns. Though while the V for Vendetta comic pits the impoverished totalitarian state against an agent of anarchy, Alfonso Cuarón's protagonists are more in the camp of vague hope and intrinsic optimism for human nature. Perhaps there's even a spiritual element, as the idea of a miraculous pregnancy to save humanity seems clearly allegorical.

But fortunately (for me, anyway), the movie's more about how people react under the stress of desperate adventures, which is a lot of fun. Clive Owen's great as always, and so is Claire-Hope Ashitey as the pregnant woman. Danny Huston's brief scene is interesting--as a well placed government official, he's used his wealth and resources to save works of art from ravaging mobs, so his otherwise austere white home is decorated with Michelangelo's David and Picasso's Guernica. A pair of pet oversized dogs completes the impression rather nicely of a home I bet the film's art designer would probably have designed for himself.
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From:[info]sovay
Date: January 14th, 2007 01:22 am (UTC)
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I think it was in The Proposition that I first noticed Danny Huston and I thought to myself, "Another interesting and talented person named Huston? Surely not another of Walter Huston's talented descendents."

I noticed him first in The Constant Gardener, as a British diplomat (and if you have not seen the movie, I recommend it: John le Carré is remarkably well served by adaptations of his work).

Children of Men has been on my list of films to see since I found out the book was written by P.D. James. The presence of Clive Owen doesn't hurt, either.
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From:[info]setsuled
Date: January 14th, 2007 05:00 am (UTC)
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I noticed him first in The Constant Gardener

I did see that, actually. I enjoyed it, though didn't notice Danny Huston for some reason.

It's interesting--Marie Antoinette's the only movie so far where I've heard his natural, American accent.
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From:[info]sovay
Date: January 14th, 2007 05:32 am (UTC)
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though didn't notice Danny Huston for some reason.

I think it's the only film I've seen him in, although that may not be true.

It's interesting--Marie Antoinette's the only movie so far where I've heard his natural, American accent.

Well, there you go: I didn't realize his natural accent was American.
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From:[info]stsisyphus
Date: January 16th, 2007 03:55 pm (UTC)
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Children of Men is the movie V for Vendetta ought to have been.

I was just thinking that the other day when I was in some movie store looking at a copy of V for Vendetta. Certainly Children of Men far better captured the essence of the propaganda machine. One shouldn't parody or satirize propaganda or the manufacturing of consent in any such thriller. For most independently thinking people, it's already self-satirical.

The best, most chilling part of Children of Men is that it didn't bother to manufacture a Orwellian dystopia at all. The worst parts of the world that the film depicts could have easily been cobbled from news sources and documentaries. In fact, the film plays less as speculative fiction than historical fiction: as if we are watching a film depicting events that had happened in the relative past, cleaned up for narrative sake and with plenty of cultural hints and references dropped for those who "remember" the atrocities.
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From:[info]setsuled
Date: January 17th, 2007 12:38 am (UTC)
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One shouldn't parody or satirize propaganda or the manufacturing of consent in any such thriller. For most independently thinking people, it's already self-satirical.

Yeah. It's a pretty ham-handed thing to do.
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