Split Screen: ‘Children of Men’ as Both Book and Film
Comparing P.D. James’s Classic Dystopian Novel and Its Big-Screen Adaptation
The connection between books and movie adaptations is usually tenuous, often treacherous. Christopher Tolkien was famously unhappy about Peter Jackson’s adaptations of his father’s masterwork, The Lord of the Rings. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me,” he told Le Monde. “There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”
I’m tempted to dismiss his reaction as overwrought, but I get it: I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the final installments of Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. One was enough. People who first encounter a book and later view the movie often report disappointment. Want to signal your letdown? No problem: “The book was better” produces a few thousand results on Etsy.
Same But Different
Other times we see the movie and then go back to the source material, hoping to deepen our experience, usually assuming the book will prove superior. It doesn’t always: I still recall my teenage disappointment when finishing Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson and encountering—gasp!—no pirates. Most of the drama in Walt Disney’s film depended on the threat of seagoing brigands. Wyss had no use for them, and his novel proved correspondingly boring (to my adolescent self) as a result.
Similarly, I read David Morrell’s First Blood around fourteen after seeing the movie. In the film, John Rambo’s friend and former commanding officer in Vietnam, Sam Trautman, helps bring the rogue vet into custody. Not so in the book where Rambo barely remembers Trautman and dies at his hand, Rambo’s head—spoiler alert!—blown off with a shotgun.
Sylvester Stallone couldn’t stomach the idea of Rambo dying and changed the ending. He also transformed Trautman’s character to forge a stronger bond and limited Rambo’s body count to a solitary, accidental death; both revisions humanized Rambo and lowered the bar for viewer sympathy.
But even if an author and filmmaker share the same sense of a story, movies force changes upon the source material.
We sometimes forget how radically books and movies differ as media. Jumping from one to the other requires significant adjustment. Narration and character development must change, same with the amount of material capable of inclusion. To successfully make the leap, elements—including pivotal plot lines, characters, and the like—must be left out and others altered to fit, some utterly transformed.
These dynamics are compounded when directors and authors have divergent visions for the stories they tell. What compelled an author to write a book may have little to do with what later attracts a director to the project. As a case study, I submit P.D. James’s 1992 dystopian classic The Children of Men and its 2006 adaptation by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón.
Starting Place
In James’s imagined future, a sudden infertility crisis affects the entire globe; one day, as a character explains, the maternity ward’s upcoming schedule was simply blank. No more children. The privileged status of the final generation, named Omegas, manifests in a sense of superiority, antisocial tendencies, and violent criminality. In their twenties as the story begins, some of the Omegas roam the countryside in dangerous gangs.
As depopulation takes hold, governments collapse and reconfigure. England finds itself ruled by a small council, a benign dictatorship—though not as benign as it might seem. Criminals are rounded up and exiled to the Isle of Man, where the unlucky survive under savage conditions. Foreign workers are exploited for cheap labor but prevented from settling. And the elderly are manipulated into mass euthanasia events to relieve their burden on the state.
A small dissident group with Christian sympathies, the Five Fishes, opposes these and other policies on moral grounds but struggle to make their case. They contact Theo Faron, an Oxford professor of Victorian history who once temporarily served as counselor to his cousin Xan Lyppiatt, England’s not-so-benign dictator. No longer serving Xan and the council, Theo resists involvement but eventually agrees to help. Then a member of the Fishes turns up pregnant, and Theo finds himself joining the group, becoming a fugitive as they flee to protect the fate of this miraculous child.
The movie mostly retains these elements but transforms them all. Cuarón didn’t care how true his movie stayed to the book; he never even read it.
A Tale Transformed
Comparing the characters between the book and movie reveals the most significant changes. Cuarón overhauled them all for the screen, along with their motives and relationships, radically transforming the nature of the story.
Start with strongman Xan Lyppiatt. He’s a key character in the novel but completely absent from the movie. Cuarón had no use for him. Wanting to tell the story of a faltering democracy, he didn’t need an authoritarian autocrat. Out came the eraser. Cuarón and his screenwriters then penciled in Nigel, also presented as Theo’s cousin, a nonthreatening bureaucrat who helps Theo secure travel papers when needed.
Theo changes from an Oxford historian to a onetime political activist turned lowly state functionary with a desk job and an alcohol problem. In the book he’s divorced, his marriage the second casualty after his child dies of his negligence in a small but gut-wrenching accident. In the movie he’s similarly unattached from his wife, but this time their child has died in a pandemic. And his ex?
Julian co-leads the Five Fishes in the novel, someone unknown to Theo until she attends one of his classes and then seeks out his help with Xan. In the movie, Julian still leads the Fishes, but now she’s Theo’s former wife, recruiting him to get papers from Nigel. And why do they need those?
Someone’s pregnant in both the book and novel, but it’s not the same woman. In both versions, Theo becomes transfixed by the job of keeping the woman safe, but from whom? You guessed it: That’s changed too.
Xan pursues Theo and the mother in the book, hoping to aggrandize for himself whatever political gains come from controlling the first human birth in over two decades. Sans Xan, that threat changes in the movie. Now it’s the Fishes who want the child for themselves.
Without Xan, who stands in for the baddie? In the novel, the Anglican priest Luke serves as spiritual leader for the Five Fishes; he’s Julian’s calm confessor, a relationship that leads to a momentous sexual indiscretion. In the movie he’s Julian’s hotheaded and treacherous lieutenant—nothing priestly about him in the slightest.
This change radically alters the trajectory of the story. With Movie Theo taking the role of Julian’s husband, there’s no need for Rolf, her husband in the book; like Xan, he’s simply dropped while Movie Luke assumes all of Rolf’s irrational, impulsive traits. In the movie, Theo overhears Luke plotting his death and the Fish’s plan to use the child to inspire an antigovernment uprising.
Theo tells the mother and the pair take flight, attempting to make contact with the Human Project, a slightly mythic group of scientists trying to crack the infertility problem. James had no need for the Human Project in her novel; Cuarón and his screenwriters invented it for the movie.
What Jasper Tells Us
While in flight, the fugitives hide away in a forest retreat with Jasper. In the book, he’s a marginal character, Theo’s old prof who asks for favor that Theo selfishly denies. Movie Jasper is, on the other hand, an old hippie, a friend and mentor to Theo, hunkering down in the woods and growing weed on the sly after quitting his career as a political cartoonist.
Jasper takes on a larger role in the movie because he forms part of the moral core of the story. Not only does he provide a hiding place for Theo and the mother, he also stands between them and the Fishes when they’re found, providing a chance for escape while he pays with his life.
In the book Julian occupies the moral core with Theo gradually moving her direction, his moral transformation finding expression in both his actions and several diary entries James includes in the narrative. Having no access to that kind of interiority in the movie, Cuarón gives Theo’s transformation a different shape, expressed primarily in his self-sacrificial commitment to mother and child—a commitment cemented by witnessing Jasper’s defiant act of self-sacrifice.
The overhaul of Jasper’s character underscores the ways in which stories change to successfully move from the page to the screen. Viewers and critics may differ on the specific changes made, but such changes are inevitable, and any one of those changes might affect the import of the story.
In Cuarón’s case, he had access to a screenplay that more closely followed James’s book but rejected it and, as mentioned, refused to even read the novel. After reading a brief synopsis of the book, Cuarón began to see a story he wanted to film. But it wasn’t James’s story, only repurposed elements from it.
As critics have pointed out—for instance, Christopher Orr in The Atlantic and Anthony Sacramone in First Things—Cuarón’s editorial decisions muted the Christian aspects of James’s novel. Would those have played well on screen? Possibly. Regardless, that’s not the movie we got. Maybe someday we will; as either version of the story remind us, there’s always room for hope.
What about you? I’d love to hear about your take on adaptations, good and bad. Who’s done it well? Who’s done it poorly? Leave your comments below.
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Before you go, here’s more on screen adaptations:
A movie that is much better than the book is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is ok, but the movie creates a visually stunning world. And Roy Batey's final soliloquy is one of my all-time favorite movie moments.
Lots of movies have been based on Dick's stories, and they're usually very good: Total Recall, Minority Report, among others. He came up with great ideas, but his books didn't usually fulfill them. I hope someone adapts Ubik one day.
I actually saw the film of The Children of Men before reading the book, which made the book’s radical differences from the film quite jarring. But I also found the book much more powerful. The dystopian elements, particularly people’s responses to the widespread infertility (such as grown women pushing prams with baby dolls in them), stuck vividly in my head. And the religious imagery was more interesting.