This movie revolves around the life story of Fiona Maye, a judge at the family law court, whose life turns down, when her marriage becomes in dilemma according to her work, but the big struggle she faces is the case of Adam, a 17 year old boy suffering from Leukemia, and in a need to blood transfusion, the thing that refused by his parents, according to their religious beliefs, so she does her best to save his life.
Like so many of the movies that stem from McEwan's novels, "The Children Act" is a soulful and sophisticated adult drama that peers into the void between the beauty of ideals and the cost of living by them.
The Children Act can feel sluggish and melodramatic, weighed down with the use of superfluous flashbacks, letter-reading voice-overs, and the repeated use of stodgy Bach passages. Intelligent, but airless.
The pale, sharp-featured Whitehead brings an appropriately feverish intensity to Adam, who looks less like a typical 21st-century teenager than Lord Byron with a backpack.
What makes it not just a feature film but a feature film worth catching (if you're in a cerebral frame of mind) is the quality of Thompson's performance.
If Emma Thompson can't make this drama about a family-court judge conflicted over her own decisions and the precarious state of her own family into something interesting and meaningful, then no one can. And she can't.
File this under missed opportunity. More often than not, it feels like a pretentious episode of Holby City. Or a shallow take on John Huston's The Dead.
he Children Act works strongest as a tight character study of the central female figure, elevated to higher ground by the astonishing lead performance.
