REVIEW
The Children Act
Stars: 4.5
Starring Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Fionn Whitehead, Ben Chaplin, Eileen Walsh, Anthony Calf, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Jason Watkins, Nicholas Jones and Rosie Cavaliero
Directed by Richard Eyre
Written by Ian McEwan
Rated: PG for coarse language and drug use
Runtime: 105 minutes
The Children Act screens on Monday, Feb. 25, at 7 p.m. at the Arden Theatre as part of the St. Albert Public Library’s Reel Mondays fundraiser. All proceeds go towards producing the St. Albert Readers’ Festival, also known as STARFest.
Tickets are $15 each or $60 for a season pass for all five movies. Tickets are available at the Customer Service desk and at www.Eventbrite.ca. Call 780-459-1530 or visit www.sapl.ca for more information.
For my money, Emma Thompson is right up there for the best actress in portraying a diverse array of characters from the highly intelligent, quirky and complicated, to the witty, well-spoken and possibly more than a little repressed.
Her looks always seem ultimately sympathetic yet harbouring long-held secret desires she can barely contain any longer. She suffers the fools, but with more grace than a saint. She’s basically the Meryl Streep of the U.K., except she has a proper British accent.
Yup, she’s a heck of a lot of fun to watch with her magician’s catalogue of facial expressions and mannerisms. She can do anything and everything from Shakespeare to shaking a stick at the wind. In short, I would pay full price to watch Thompson spending an hour trying to determine which detergent she should buy at the supermarket, before going home empty-handed.
Note to self: pitch this movie idea to Thompson the next time I run into her.
Regardless, she’s the perfect person to portray the Honourable Mrs. Justice Fiona Maye, a family judge at the High Court of Justice of England, in The Children Act.
With stiff upper lip firmly set, Maye makes decisions that affect children and families in dire situations, even mortal situations. We first meet her when she sets down her decision to separate conjoined twins, at the expense of the life of one. That’s right around the same time that we discover how dire her marriage is. She and husband Jack (Stanley Tucci) don’t have kids. Actually, they don’t have ... anything. The law is her life, while he works as a university professor. The lack of affection leads him to want to play like some university professors (who are surrounded by younger and more vibrant colleagues) often do, too.
That’s when 17-year-old Adam (Fionn Whitehead) enters the proceedings. His leukemia treatment requires blood transfusions but he refuses for religious reasons. It’s up to Maye to decide his fate. Unwittingly, she does more than that and the results upset her entire balance.
This isn’t a story about simple regrets; it’s about much more than that. It’s like Dickens crossed with Austen and more than a splash of a U.K. Law and Order vibe to it, but in a far less sensational manner than that would have. This is real life; these are real people; they have real problems; and none of them have easy answers. It would be unbearably uneasy to experience first-hand but in viewing it on screen with such wonderful actors as Thompson, Tucci and the young Whitehead to lead us into the fray, it is a beautiful, tragic thing, and it must be watched.
