Review: THE CHILDREN ACT

Judge Fiona Maye manages her days with a clipped efficiency and intimidating wit at a pace that belies the notion that the top jobs are easy. Her husband, a heavily white collared American, proposes that he have an affair as their own union has long dried sexually and it might add a valve of relief to the marriage. She doesn't have time to be more than winded by this as a case comes up whose urgency all but erases it. A boy of seventeen is denying a blood transfusion to treat his leukemia through religious conviction: he a Jehova's Witness, as we learn from a well place vignette near the start the sect believe the blood to be the literal carriage of the soul so the ingestion of another's is pollution. Who's right?

Strained by strong arguments from both sides and preoccupied by her own personal crisis, Maye must rule either way and rapidly. Seeking to break the circuit she visits the patient, Adam, in his hospital bed to find out how much of the decision is his rather than his parents' and subculture. His plea has an adolescent naivete but it is convincing. Noticing the guitar at the end of his bed she asks his to play. His first stumbling few chords open a song they both know and she sings it while he strums. She makes her excuses (court) and leaves him screaming for more of her company, the first, we get the feeling, that has treated his intellect genuinely.

Maye makes her judgement for the hospital and the boy receives his lifesaving treatment. The husband,self-banished, is back but relegated to the spare bed. There's that .. and the next case. But her judgement follows her, literally. Adam, newly vital from her decision, is now obsessed with her. Although he pleas that he hasn't replaced one tooth fairy with another he is clearly in the kind of awe of her that anyone of his age might well be prey to. When they are in the same space it's as though it is encased in a kind of ectoplasmic bubble of his secretion. How to escape this? He has an idea. It's not a good one.

Emma Thompson brings to her judge a mind too engaged and busy to stop for a moment and every thought it deals with can be lightlessly deep. This means that we are given pause to see her in painful puzzle at her husband's sudden request (to him, one long in the making) but gratified at her resourceful dealing with the difficult boy at the centre of the case. We find ourselves watching keenly for a moment of strain that will break to his force as she understands simultaneously how similar the situation is to her husband's but how damaging it would be to indulge it. Even as an emotive human she must remain a judge. Thompson carries this into visceral territory amking this one of the year's most compelling onscreen performances I've seen.

The rest of the cast provide great support. Fion Whitehead as Adam scares us with his chaotic intensity. Stanley Tucci manages to put more than the boy-man mid-lifer that the script has him. Jason Watkins, one of those know him if you see him, U.K. character actors as Maye's patient clerk is a delight. And Ben Chaplin as Adam's father provides us with a man committed to a (to an outsider like myself) bizarre religious conviction and make it not just believable but reasonable and terrifying. He reminded me of no one so much as Michael Craig whose similar role in the 1962 Life for Ruth also impressed.

The Children Act does a lot with what might have been a scant canvas; big morality and bigger decisions, reconciliation and the weight (or lack of weight) of our convictions. The film looks and feels quite plain for this reason: it must traverse real melodrama to get to real pain and so can't go about complicating the business of putting it all on a screen. When you have Ian McEwan adapting his own novel and performances like Thompsons, you'll settle for that.