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The life of Fiona Maye, a kindhearted judge at a family law, who does her work well, the thing that brings her terrible with her husband, but she chooses her work and focuses on saving the life of Adam, a 17 year old boy, who suffers from Leukemia, and in a big need to a blood transfusion, but his parents refuse, according to their religious beliefs.
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.