A24
Ah, the Brits. What with their sort of English speaking and love of dry wit, they often have comedies that tickle a very specific sort of American sensibility. Their dramas though, can get quite overwrought. Not all, naturally, but I struggle to think of the last truly grand British drama that didn’t indulge at least a little in heavy emotional payout in a thin story.
The Children Act comes from director Richard Eyre (mostly known for theatre and theatre adaptations) and writer Ian McEwan, based on his 2014 novel of the same name. Emma Thompson stars as High Court judge Fiona Maye in the UK, a lady with authority and carefully written speech. Although she is highly respected in her career, at home things are different. Her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci) explicitly tells her that despite still loving her, he is planning to have an affair.
This bizarre, weirdly written dialog seems like it’s from an artificial human, despite the endless charm of Stanley Tucci behind the words. It’s also problematic in that the arc of the marriage goes nowhere, except the most pat and dull of conclusions. This so-called subplot is severely unbalanced, so we never end up truly getting a sense of why we should care about these two together or apart, seemingly only relying on the acting talents of the two leads instead.
The primary plotline is that Fiona oversees a case about a 17-year old boy, just barely under majority, named Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead from Dunkirk) who has leukemia and desperately needs a blood transfusion. Simple enough, except that Adam and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have a specific belief about blood explicitly tied into the spiritual representation of life. Other Biblical scholars take the scripture in question to refer to a prohibition to consuming blood as food, but that’s the Bible for you — people disagree.
Here the movie uses the title of ‘The Children Act’, a reference to a 1989 law in the UK that gave the government freedom over the protection of children, as way to argue philosophy in edgy cases. In this case, the law seems clear — the judge can choose that protecting the underage child (which he is) trumps religious freedom. If Adam was an adult (which he almost is), the government could not force treatment.
It is a complicated scenario because it’s about people, and people are emotional beasts. Adam’s parents plead their case to the judge, who ultimately decides (in a weird breach of normal conduct) to visit Adam in the hospital to see if he truly is acting like an adult. An interesting idea, but the movie goes in weird, troubling places after that, and the movie simply decides that Adam is a child in some ways, an adult in others, and raises questions it doesn’t answer but instead tries to slam emotion in our faces.
Fionn Whitehead does a very good job here, spitting on teenage philosophical aphorisms in a predictable way, but he’s good nonetheless. Emma Thompson is certainly an excellent actor, and she is certainly the best part of this movie, but after it was all over, it felt like I was missing the point. I still am not clear on whether the movie had anything really to say at all or if it just like ‘raising the question’. To me, that’s ultimately a boring decision.
The Children Act has a run time of 1 hour 45 minute and rated R for a sexual reference.
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