The book is better.(Children of Men)(Movie review)

IT's easy for a good movie to color subsequent readings of the book it's based on. Literature is a subtle, fragile medium, more complex than cinema but also easily overwhelmed by what gets summoned up on screen. It's hard to re-read even so powerful a story as J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings without Peter Jackson's Middle-earth crowding into the mind's eye, shunting the imagination aside. Pick up Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and you're likely to picture Humphrey Bogart filling Philip Marlowe's suit; re-read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and you'll probably hear Maggie Smith's brogue trilling the title character's every line of dialogue.

Sometimes, though, it works the other way: A great book can spoil a good film adaptation, by setting the bar so high that mere artistic success is insufficient, and the viewer spends the film regretting the places where the novelist's genius outshines the director's vision. That's the case with Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of P. D. James's dystopian novel--it's an impressive movie, touched by flashes of inspiration, but it's best seen, and judged, by an audience that hasn't yet read the book.

Like James's novel, the movie takes place in a near-future world in which the entire population has been rendered infertile, and humanity is a couple of decades deep into its final four score and ten. The setting is Great Britain, the last outpost of order in a globe gone to bedlam. Or quasi-order, at least: There's a fascistic government bent on rounding up illegal immigrants, advertisements for suicide pills on television, and bands of flagellants on the streets of London. Our guide through this chaos is a brooding Clive Owen, lending his usual bitter charm to the role of Theo Faron, once a political activist and now a hard-drinking functionary in the Ministry of Energy. He slouches unmoved through a decaying landscape that's part 1990s Sarajevo and part Blade Runner, and the camera prowls around him--curious and appalled where he has gone numb, lingering over scenes of misery (bombs, sobbing women, rock-throwing vagrants) that he allows to wash off his back.

This routinized despair is interrupted soon enough, of course, when Owen's Theo is kidnapped--by his ex-wife, it turns out, now the head of a radical group known as the Fishes, who are bent on overthrowing the government, saving the immigrants from their miserable refugee camps, and restoring equality before the law. Or something like that: Theo's ex, played by Julianne Moore, is clearly on the side of the angels, but the rest of her merry band offer a cautionary lesson in the perils of idealism run amok. This is a movie with a tedious anti-Bush message woven in: The government's immigrant roundups take place under the aegis of "Homeland Security," and there are obvious nods to Fallujah, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. But Cuaron is savvy enough to complicate his story's politics, to paint the rebels in shades of gray and even black, and to choose a "plague on both your houses" approach to his dystopia over an easy left-wing Manichaeism.

Besides, Children of Men isn't really interested in scoring political points--it's a chase ...