The Children Act
Richard Eyre (2017)
If you’re going to see one film of an Ian McEwan novel this year, make it The Children Act rather than On Chesil Beach. If you want a good drama about Jehovah’s Witnesses, see Daniel Kokotajlo’s Apostasy and give The Children Act a miss. Richard Eyre’s adaptation of McEwan’s 2014 novel, with a screenplay by the author, is more entertaining than expected, largely because the story takes a lavishly melodramatic turn after the protagonist, the High Court judge Fiona Maye (Emma Thompson), has delivered a pivotal ruling. Mrs Justice Maye (Fiona hereafter) permits a hospital to give a blood transfusion to seventeen-year-old Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead), a leukaemia patient, despite his and his parents’ lack of consent to this, on religious grounds.
Fiona’s ruling is not a surprise. As she reminds the court in delivering her judgment, the Children Act (2004) provides that ‘the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration’. What’s unusual is that, before confirming her decision, she visits Adam in hospital, in order to gain a direct insight into what he thinks and wants. Adam’s condition improves as a result of medical treatment, including the transfusion, that he receives. The impression that Fiona’s brief visit makes on him is hardly less powerful. Like an earlier McEwan lifesaver, Joe Rose in Enduring Love, Fiona finds herself on the receiving end of an obsession[1]. Adam starts sending her texts and letters and turns up at her place of work and even the judge’s lodgings in Newcastle, during Fiona’s visit there as a circuit judge. She repeatedly, kindly but firmly tells him not to contact her again and to get on with living the life he can now enjoy; her divided feelings surface only in their prolonged kiss as she prepares to send him back to London from Newcastle. Not long afterwards, Fiona learns that Adam’s condition has deteriorated, that he’s in a hospice and once more refusing a blood transfusion. He is now eighteen, no longer a minor. Fiona dashes to his bedside for a tearful farewell. In the film’s final scene, she and her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci) attend Adam’s funeral.
The state of Fiona’s marriage has been summarised within about thirty seconds of the start of The Children Act. At home, she’s working late on a judgment she must deliver the following day (regarding conjoined twins whose parents oppose their separation, also on religious grounds). Irritated by her husband’s interruption to tell her he’s going to bed, she keeps her eyes trained on the computer screen and her back turned to him. Jack doesn’t get Fiona’s attention until, a few scenes later, he tells her that, thanks to her complete preoccupation with work and their consequently loveless relationship, he’s thinking of having an affair. A university academic, he later admits to a one-or-two-night fling with another academic while supposedly away on a conference. (He’s a classicist and his lover a statistician, which proves, if nothing else, the growing trend of interdisciplinary collaborations in British universities.) The short-lived affair is enough for Fiona to get the locks changed on their apartment and to initiate divorce proceedings. Jack gets locked out once but is then (without explanation) back in residence. This enables Richard Eyre and Ian McEwan to insert a bit where Jack’s two young nieces come to stay with him and Fiona, and ask, ‘Uncle Jack, why are you sleeping on the sofa?’ Fiona doesn’t speak to the young guests. Instead, she looks mournfully out of the window into the garden, where Jack is playing a jolly game with the two little girls. Fiona and Jack have no kids of their own: during one of their rows, she refers angrily to ‘the child I’ve failed to give you’.
Ian McEwan seems to think the idea of a specialist in children’s law who is herself childless, and therefore incomplete, a poignant dramatic conception. (More than sixty years ago, Ingmar Bergman used a gynaecologist who doesn’t understand women as a comic premise in A Lesson in Love.) It’s evidently important to McEwan to be admired as a creative writer thoroughly engaged with the real world and associated with leading lights within it – witness his learned appendices to Enduring Love and research undertaken for Saturday at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. He has written in the Guardian about attending ‘dinner with a handful of judges’, whose host, Sir Alan Ward, was the judge involved in the real-life case that inspired The Children Act. McEwan’s intellectual self-regard is such that he assumes that whatever he puts in a novel dealing with scientific or legal issues demands to be taken as seriously as those issues. He’s oblivious to how tired an idea – brilliant at her job, crap at her personal life – his heroine is.
In spite of his antipathy to religious belief and institutions, McEwan is also a leading exponent of preaching to the converted, plenty of whom enjoy his flattery – hence, for example, Peter Bradshaw’s description of The Children Act as ‘bracingly intelligent and civilised’. McEwan allows Adam’s devout Jehovah’s Witness father his day in court: Kevin Henry (Ben Chaplin) stands up creditably to the sarcastic onslaught of the hospital’s counsel Mark Berner (Anthony Calf). But the lawyer representing the Henry family (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is reduced to the seemingly desperate argument that, although Adam isn’t yet an adult within the terms of the relevant legislation, he should be treated in the matter of his treatment as if he were. In any event, Richard Eyre and McEwan can be confident that Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t flock to the film and that the vast majority of their ‘intelligent’ audience will be parti pris on the right side of the argument.
The ‘civilised’ aspect of things is important too. In the opening scene, Fiona may be focused on composing her judgment but there’s classical music playing in the room (discreetly, of course) as she writes. When, after the conjoined twins case is over, Jack vainly hopes he and his wife might enjoy themselves over the weekend ahead, he mentions a ‘doubles’ (presumably tennis, which, for some reason, isn’t tarred with the same philistine brush as other sports) and ‘tickets for the opera’. There’s a piano in the apartment for Fiona to play but no television to sully the exquisitely appointed surroundings. Perhaps Eyre and McEwan intend the culturally rarefied condition of the couple’s world to reflect the emotional insufficiency of their marriage but I suspect it’s meant to enhance their tragic credentials.
Mark Berner, an accomplished singer, and Fiona, accompanying him on the piano, perform together each year at a Christmas concert for the great and good of the London legal world. The events of the film take place as they prepare for this year’s concert. Their opening number will be the carol ‘Lully, lulla/Thou little tiny child’. (I’m not making this up.) Their encore song will be ‘My Funny Valentine’. (Or that.) The eventual concert performance is the melodramatic climax of The Children’s Act. As Fiona and Mark are about to take the stage, her loyal clerk Nigel (Jason Watkins) hands her a note informing her that Adam is in the hospice, in Camberwell, and may not last the night.
Fiona, though greatly distracted, gets through ‘Lully, lulla’ and the next piece. When it comes to the encore and Mark opens his mouth to sing ‘My Funny Valentine’, she plays a different tune and does the singing too. It’s a reprise of a setting to music of the W B Yeats poem ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’: when she visited Adam in hospital during the court hearing, he was learning the tune on the guitar and Fiona sang along. What was borderline plausible the first time around is laughably contrived now. She then flees the concert, rushes out into torrential rain to get a cab to Camberwell, sprints along the hospice corridor, and so on … She eventually returns home, distressed and soaking wet. Jack, who was in the audience at the concert, follows her in, exclaims, ‘You’re wet through!’, and, rather than getting her out of her wet clothes, puts his overcoat round her shoulders – in case she’s going out again? The whole episode is shamelessly OTT, enough to make any TV soap green with envy.
The direction the plot takes would be easier to accept if the screenplay gave its bizarreness free rein but that would require McEwan to show things from Adam’s point of view as well as Fiona’s and he’s not interested in doing so. Adam is essentially a vehicle for the moral dilemma and for bringing Fiona’s anxieties and unhappiness into the foreground. And since Fiona, until she lurches out of character at and after the concert, is consistently controlled and professional, the scope for dramatising her response to Adam’s behaviour is limited. Until the kiss outside judge’s lodgings, the film has given no hint that Adam’s infatuation with her may have a sexual element, even though, with Emma Thompson in the role, Fiona is formidably attractive. Instead, his letters to her are all about poetry, music, the life of the mind as experienced by someone newly unshackled by religious dogma. (Adam’s liberation is anticipated in the film’s single scene of Jack at his university work, telling students about the blessed interval between the death of Greek polytheism and the advent of Christianity, which ‘closed western minds’.)
The Children Act is sometimes oddly opaque. When he turns up in Newcastle, the frustrated Adam, as well as telling Fiona that he wants to come and live with her (and her husband), berates her for seeing him in hospital, when she already knew what judgment she was going to give. His accusation strikes this exceptionally articulate woman dumb. The motive for her visit seemed clear and reasonable at the time. His father and his counsel made much in court about Adam’s remarkable independence of mind and refuted the suggestion that he was withholding consent under the influence of his parents; Fiona wanted to test these claims for herself. Why doesn’t she tell Adam that?
A scene in which Adam tells his father and mother (Naomi Henry) he’s never going back to Kingdom Hall seems misplaced in the sequence of events. The film also blurs Adam’s motivation for refusing a second blood transfusion. In the novel, according to Wikipedia: ‘Fiona receives another letter from Adam, a religious poem, which implies that he thinks of her as Satan for tempting him away from religion and has returned to the faith’. In the film, when she visits him in the hospice, he simply whispers, ‘My choice … My Lady’ (the form of address for Mrs Justice Maye in court). It’s not clear how he’s reverted to the faith he lost or even if he has: maybe Adam, rejected by Fiona, has decided life’s not worth living without her in it?
Fiona’s hotfooting it to the hospice is an invention for the film (in the book, she learns at the Christmas concert that Adam has died). It makes for a bit of high-speed action, a reminder that we’re watching a movie as well as listening to a lecture. You wouldn’t expect a Richard Eyre film to be visually interesting and this one isn’t. It’s shocking, even so, to see him rely on clichés like the rent-a-mob press pack outside the Royal Courts of Justice (one of the worst I’ve recently seen, though the competition is fierce). Inside, it’s a different matter. The well-staged courtroom sequences are one of two positive reasons to see The Children Act. The other reason is much of the acting.
Casting Emma Thompson at the centre of a drama as self-important as this one made me fear the worst: as an actress, Thompson has a tendency to keep reminding the viewer, when the occasion demands, that she’s involved in a morally serious enterprise. There’s a hint of this when Fiona delivers her judgments in court, which are a bit too acted. Thompson’s carefully composed expression and sensitive voice are designed to make crystal clear that these-are-complex-issues-but-humane-compassion-trumps-superstition-in-a-modern-rational-society-like-ours. For most of The Children Act, however, you have to admire (I admit I’m doing so against my will) Thompson’s economical and incisive technique. The outward indicators of Fiona’s professional authority are obvious enough but Thompson walks, wears her clothes and does business with her spectacles with such aplomb that she’s very good to watch. It’s hardly her fault that the character McEwan has written is so circumscribed that you respond less to Fiona’s personality than to how expertly Emma Thompson is presenting her.
Both the marital crisis and the rapprochement of Fiona and Jack are corny and mechanical. Stanley Tucci’s American speech rhythms are welcome in loosening up some of the tight dialogue but in the closing stages he can do little more than give tactful supportive smiles. Adam, though an idea rather than a person, is played very appealingly by Fionn Whitehead. He also matches up well physically with Ben Chaplin, who’s excellent in the court scenes. Nikki Amuka-Bird, Anthony Calf and Jason Watkins are all good. Watkins seems too busy and theatrical at first but he engages so strongly with his thin role that he wins you over. I liked the devoted Nigel’s careful packing of ‘My Lady’s’ wig and gown for her trip to Newcastle. It’s a bonus to see Rosie Cavaliero, wonderful in the second series of Unforgotten on television, in a cinema film. I didn’t really understand who her character was meant to be (some kind of ‘guardian’ for Adam, who accompanies the judge on her visit to the hospital) but Cavaliero makes this woman vividly human. The music is by J S Bach and Stephen Warbeck and even I can tell them apart.
27 August 2018
[1] There’s a difference, of course: it isn’t the life of the obsessive Jed Parry that Joe saves in Enduring Love. Even so, the echo is hard to ignore.