Thompson saves this implausible legal saga
You could hardly cook up a juicier moral quandary than the one at The Children Act’s heart. And cooked up is exactly what the new film from Richard Eyre (Iris, Notes on a Scandal) often feels like. Adapted by Ian Mcewan from his own 2014 novel, it is a drama in which, like a Michelinstar-wannabe dish, every component feels painstakingly tweezered into place. They do rest on one impeccable, locally sourced ingredient, though: a tremendous performance from Emma Thompson, in her first lead role of substance since Saving Mr Banks (2013).
Thompson plays Fiona Maye, a London High Court judge specialising in family law. As the film begins, she has just ruled that a pair of conjoined twins should be separated to save the stronger sibling’s life, provoking an outcry from a religious pressure group. “I gave instructions to slaughter a baby,” Fiona says with a thin smile, when her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci) asks how her day went. As a university lecturer, Jack’s grapplings with morality tend to be theoretical: that makes him cavalier, whereas Fiona is rigorous by both nature and trade.
As such, when Jack announces one evening that he quite fancies having an affair, Fiona is appalled, and tells him to pack a suitcase. Work doesn’t give her the mental bandwidth required to process this, anyway: she is about to hear the case of a 17-year-old leukaemia patient refusing a blood transfusion on religious grounds. Adam Henry (Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead) has been raised a Jehovah’s Witness – and Fiona must decide whether his wishes should take precedence over the hospital’s.
She takes the unusual step of visiting him in hospital to see if he knows his own mind: this becomes instrumental in her ruling, but also brings on a major dramatic derailment. Young Adam is wonderstruck, calling her “My Lady” – it is the appropriate mode of address, though he says it like a knight-errant with his eye on a princess. But nothing in Mcewan’s script nor Whitehead’s performance makes his awestruck manner feel at all plausible, let alone explicable – and the boy comes across as less pious than an irksome creep.
Had someone other than Mcewan adapted the screenplay, they might have realised de-ageing Adam by a few years would have helped enormously to sell this key first screen encounter. They may have also noticed that Tucci’s role is underwritten almost to the point of superfluity – and that the conclusion smacks of a last-minute loss of nerve.
The film is carried through a lot of this by the sheer quality of Thompson’s performance. And Eyre and his team convincingly bring to life the story’s very particular legal-world milieu, from the orderly ambience of Fiona’s apartment to Jason Watkins’s terrific supporting performance as her clerk. As thought-provoking dramas aimed at adult audiences go, The Children Act talks the talk. But it feels a little like a confection dressed up as nourishment.