BRITISH cinema continues its fascination with adapting Ian McEwan novels, following this year’s romance drama On Chesil Beach, with this moral drama based on his 2014 book of the same name.
The incomparable Emma Thompson plays Fiona, a High Court judge specialising in family law who takes on some of the most challenging cases the system can conjure up.
One day she finds herself going against her usual approach of never getting emotionally involved by visiting the hospital bedside of 17-year-old Adam (Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead), who has leukaemia.
In keeping true to his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness and the likewise beliefs of his fraught parents (Ben Chaplin and Eileen Walsh), Adam is refusing a blood transfusion he desperately needs. Should she rule that the hospital force treatment on him? Or should she respect his wishes, most likely leading to his death?
It feels more like a two-part BBC drama than anything necessarily cinematic. However, working from a script by McEwan himself, director Richard Eyre (Iris, Notes on a Scandal) delivers a solidly compelling drama that melds together the sombre and the stirring, while also posing some harsh and fascinating moral conundrums for us to wrangle with right alongside the central character.
It’s intriguing to see how the drama unfolds as Fiona gets involved on a personal level she never usually goes near and how it ripples throughout her life.
Chiefly this includes her already crumbling marriage to academic American husband Jack (a subtly affecting Stanley Tucci). The film is often at its strongest when dealing with the fallout of their marital issues which feeds into and compounds Fiona’s increasingly difficult position of legal power.
Straight away we get that feeling that her bottling up the effect of all these decisions proves emotionally overwhelming in a rather devastating sequence in which Thompson gets to show off just why she’s one of the finest acting talents working today.
She’s rarely off-screen throughout and carries on her shoulders a narrative that, despite sometimes skating off into unnecessarily protracted melodrama, has a lingering power.
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