The Children Act

Synopsis: As her marriage crumbles, a family court judge (Emma Thompson) must decide a case involving a teenager (Fionn Whitehead) who is refusing a blood transfusion on religious grounds.

Having seen the trailer for what looked like an unremarkable, seen-it-all-before adult drama I was prepared to pass on The Children Act. I relented however and am glad that I did. Richard Eyre’s latest film is a serious-minded, engagingly gracious film for grown-ups that probes the moral values and emotional commitments of its characters and features a superlative performance from Emma Thompson in the lead role.

Thompson plays Fiona Maye, a family court judge who has devoted her life to her career to the point that she is childless and her husband, Jack (Stanley Tucci), a philosophy lecturer, feels irrelevant. Used to deliberating on very difficult cases (when we first see her she is having to decide whether it is better to let conjoined twins die as the religiously-motivated parents wish or to save one and sacrifice the other as logi would suggest) she is shocked when Jack announces that he is going to have an affair. The substance of the film concerns on the one hand her involvement in the thorny case of a young man , Adam (Whitehead), just shy of 18 and a Jehovah’s Witness with leukemia who with the support of his arents is refusing the blood transfusion that will probably save his life and on the other her struggle to cope with what appears to be the breakdown of her marriage.

No doubt the foundation of the film’s success is Ian McEwan’s well-researched screenplay adapted from his own novel which weaves the thematic strands together in the character of Fiona, a middle-aged woman who has assiduously chosen reason rather over emotion. Her career has flourished as a result but her emotional life is all but non-existent. As she more or less says to the neglected, sexually-frustrated Jack, “that’s how it is”.  So she is taken aback when Jack, to whom her life-and-death decision-making to which she has devoted her life appears to be beside the point, walks out on her.  Although in the characteristically English stiff-upper-lip way she soldiers on. But when Adam becomes infatuated with her, his intensity awakens feelings in her that have long since been dormant, partly libidinal, partly maternal.

Thompson is marvellous in the lead role commanding the screen with a poised forcefulness that appears capable of facing down all challenges. Of course when the dam finally breaks tears are the order of the day but Eyre rightly underplays this without sacrificing the sense that Fiona has experienced some measure of healing (as for that matter so has Jack).

Stanley Tucci is Stanley Tucci (we get no explanation as the why the paradigmatically English Fiona has an American husband) and there isn’t much of a stretch between his performance here and in Julie & Julia (2009) but, as always, he is a pleasing presence. Fionn Whitehead who played one of the three young soldiers in Dunkirk  (2014) does a good job as the over-wrought teenager in what would have been a difficult role to pull off for the cameras. Eyre's direction is consistently judicious only overdoing things in the scene in which Fiona sings with him to his guitar accompaniment.

Intelligent, articulate and handsomely presented with a suitably tasteful score by Stephen Warbeck and an outstanding performance by Emma Thompson The Children Act will reward discerning film-goers.

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