Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Director: Richard Eyre, Foxtel.
The Children Act is a powerful, mesmerising, touching piece of cinema.
Accomplished stage, screen and television director Richard Eyre (The Ploughman’s Lunch, Iris) extracts some polished performances from stars Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci.
The legal and ethical drama follows the life of an eminent High Court judge in London Fiona Maye (Thompson, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, In the Name of the Father) whose marriage to Jack Maye (Tucci, The Lovely Bones), an academic, is slowly crumbling. In the midst of this situation, she finds herself sitting in judgment on the lawful precipice between life and death.
Referred to as ‘My Lady’ by almost everyone around her, Fiona guides us into the film’s elaborate themes as she is about to rule on a much-publicised case about twins conjoined at birth.
She is then asked to rule on the case of Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead, Dunkirk), a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness with leukaemia, whose life hangs in the balance as he objects to a blood transfusion on religious grounds. Adam is still legally a child, being three months away from his 18th birthday.
The dilemma is should Fiona force him to live? Keeping in mind the best interests of children, she visits Adam in hospital. Their meeting ends up having an intense emotional impact on them both, rousing profound new emotions in the boy and long-concealed feelings in her.
Whitehead is wonderful as he portrays his reactions on being besieged by the new possibilities of life, visibly infatuated by an influential woman who saved his life.
Presiding with perception and compassion over ethically complex cases of family law, Thompson delicately conveys the nuances of a judge who lets the world in at the cost of losing her own judgement. She shines as the heart of the film, her increasingly troubling confrontations with Whitehead conveying the cathartic power one person can have over another.
English novelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan adapted the screenplay from his 2014 novel of the same name. It is intricate and enriching. The title refers to the Children Act of 1989 – a U.K. Act of Parliament, written to primarily protect the welfare of minors.
