The Children Act review: feels more like a cooped-up TV drama than a feature aimed at the big screen

Richard Eyre, 105 mins, starring: Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Fionn Whitehead, Ben Chaplin, Eileen Walsh

Emma Thompson plays a high court judge lost in a moral maze in The Children Act, director Richard Eyre’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel. It’s a disappointingly muddled affair, too buttoned up and self-conscious to work as melodrama but not especially insightful about the legal profession either.

Its main recommendation is Thompson herself, who tries hard to bring emotional complexity to her role as Fiona Maye, the music-loving judge whose personal life is close to meltdown. She’s a driven, highly successful figure in a male-dominated profession but, on the evidence here, she is also wretchedly unhappy.

Fiona continually has to rule on cases that would have tested the wisdom of Solomon. She decides on whether conjoined twins should be separated (even if it means the certain death of one of them) or whether the sickly children of Jehovah’s Witnesses should have life-saving blood transfusions, even if it means disregarding the religious beliefs of the parents.

All this work has made Fiona a dull girl. Her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci) grumbles that not only is she too busy for sex. Even worse, she doesn’t have time for tennis at the weekend.

“I think I want to have an affair,” he tells her in matter of fact fashion, as if he is off to collect the dry cleaning, complaining, “it’s not just about sex. We don’t even kiss any more.” Fiona doesn’t pay much attention but warns him he is putting their marriage at risk.

The judge isn’t an especially sympathetic character. She treats her long-suffering clerk (Jason Watkins) in very high-handed fashion, showing no interest whatsoever in his private life. The commotion in her day-to-day existence is signalled none too subtly by the way she always seems to spill her tea or coffee. Her only relaxation is playing the piano.

The drama hinges on a ruling she makes in a case of Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead from Dunkirk), a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness with leukaemia. He is refusing a blood transfusion but under the Children Act, she has the power to protect him from his “religion and himself”.

She visits him at the hospital and sings the words of a Yeats poem as he plays the guitar – not something we ever saw from Rumpole of the Bailey. He becomes obsessed by her. “Poor kid. He has lost Jehovah and found you,” one character observes of the hapless boy.

In a bolder movie, Fiona might have turned into a Mrs Robinson figure with Adam as her Benjamin. The Children Act is too British and too reticent for that. The judge keeps the teenager at arm’s length. He stalks her. It is never clear whether she welcomes his attentions but when he follows her to Newcastle, he does remind her of a time many years before when she was “wild and free”.

Judges in most movies are distant, aloof figures. It is refreshing to see one here as the main protagonist. We follow Fiona’s dilemmas rather than those of the barristers and their clients. Thompson plays Fiona with intelligence and sensitivity, conveying the character’s inner struggles as she tries (and largely fails) to balance her professional career, her morality and her own desires.

The film, though, has disappointingly modest production values. It feels more like a cooped-up TV drama than a feature aimed at the big screen. Fiona herself is too sensible, too resourceful and too hard-working ever to allow her life really to become unstuck – and that makes her all the less interesting as the heroine in a movie like this.

The Children Act hits UK cinemas 24 August.