The Children Act (2017)

28 Tuesday Aug 2018

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Blood transfusion, Court case, Drama, Emma Thompson, Fionn Whitehead, Ian McEwan, Jehovah's Witness, Judge, Leukaemia, Literary adaptation, Review, Richard Eyre, Stanley Tucci

D: Richard Eyre / 105m

Cast: Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Fionn Whitehead, Ben Chaplin, Jason Watkins, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Anthony Calf, Rosie Cavaliero, Rupert Vansittart, Nicholas Jones

Fiona Maye (Thompson) is a High Court judge who specialises in cases involving the Children Act 1989, cases that often involve a strict interpretation of the law and which require a consideration of what is best for the child, even if it’s at odds with the wishes of the parents. Fiona is married to Jack (Tucci), a classics professor, but in the wake of a particularly difficult case, Jack announces that he plans to have an affair; he’s unhappy with the lack of intimacy in their marriage. Fiona is upset by this but remains reticent until a call from her chambers advises of an emergency case that needs her attention. Jack leaves, while Fiona prepares to deal with the case of Adam Henry (Whitehead), a seventeen year old Jehovah’s Witness who will die from leukaemia unless he is given a blood transfusion. Adam is refusing to have the transfusion, and so the hospital is seeking a ruling to overturn his refusal. Against a background of religious determination and legal necessity, Fiona meets Adam before making her judgment. It’s a meeting that proves to have a profound effect on both of them…

Sometimes a movie has no choice but to rely heavily, if not completely, on the merits of a particular performance. Without that performance, the movie loses its central focus, or becomes less of an accomplished piece, or worst of all, lacks any appreciable impact. Such is the case with The Children Act, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2014 novel, and with a screenplay by McEwan himself. Without Emma Thompson, this would be a hollow movie with little to recommend it (though that’s not to say that another actress couldn’t have carried off the role to the same degree). What comes across, and very early on, is that Fiona is the whole show, and without her the storyline and the movie as a whole would amount to very little indeed. McEwan is a terrific novelist, but he’s not necessarily a terrific screenwriter, because in translating his novel to the big screen, he’s forgotten to make the elements around Fiona as interesting or intriguing as those that directly concern her. This leaves the movie dependent entirely on Thompson’s performance throughout, and in the process, relegates everyone else to the second tier.

The decision Fiona makes in regard to Adam’s case won’t surprise anyone, but once she makes it, the movie jettisons its legal drama set up and becomes something entirely expected and dramatically demoralising: Fiona finds herself “pursued” by an overly enamoured Adam. Up until now, the story has played out with a keen awareness of the legal, religious and emotional undercurrents of Adam’s case – in the witness box, Adam’s father (Chaplin) is a passionate advocate for his faith in God – but with the verdict in and Adam’s life saved, it becomes an unwieldy drama of misspent longing and unwanted attention that turns Adam from a fierce proponent of religious and personal choice into a drippy, Yeats-quoting stalker whose intelligence and wit seems to have been drained out of him along with his own blood. This sudden change hurts the movie tremendously, and makes the final half an hour something of a struggle in terms of credibility. At the same time, the sub-plot with Jack is allowed to resolve itself with a minimum of effort. With so much initial momentum overturned, it’s again thanks to Thompson’s subtle yet deeply emotive portrayal that the viewer is able to carry on until the end, but with the certain (and unavoidable) awareness that, whatever the outcome, it won’t be as insightful or impactful as what happens before Fiona reveals her decision.

Rating: 7/10 – Thompson’s magnificent performance is the real deal here, and the only deal as well, making The Children Act something of a lop-sided endeavour that’s compelling when focused on Fiona’s emotional confusion, but merely adequate at all other times; Eyre’s direction is solid, but Tucci is wasted in a thankless role, and the whole thing unfolds against a backdrop of repressed emotions that the script seems uninterested in revealing.

Mini-Review: Dinosaur 13 (2014)

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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"Sue", Black Hills Institute, Court case, Documentary, FBI, Maurice Williams, Neal Larson, Paleontology, Peter Larson, Review, Susan Hendrickson, Terry Wentz, The Field Museum, Todd Douglas Miller, Tyrannosaurus Rex

D: Todd Douglas Miller / 95m

Peter L. Larson, Neal L. Larson, Patrick Duffy, Kristin Donnan, Terry Wentz, Bob Farrar, Susan Hendrickson, Bill Harlan

In 1990, Susan Hendrickson, one of a team of workers searching for fossils at the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota, discovered the remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that proved to be eighty per cent complete. The dinosaur was named “Sue” after Hendrickson, and was purchased by the Black Hills Institute for $5,000 from the owner of the land it was found on, Maurice Williams. The remains were transported to the Institute where their cleaning and restoration was overseen by its president, Peter Larson.

In 1992, the Institute was raided by the FBI and Sue’s remains were confiscated. Larson and the Institute were accused of theft from Government land (as the property where Sue was found was held in trust). After a lengthy trial, Sue was deemed to be Williams’ property after all and her remains were returned to him. In the meantime, charges were brought against Larson, his brother Neal and other members of the Institute for financial misdeeds unrelated to Sue’s discovery. While Williams got Sotheby’s to sell Sue for the princely sum of $7.6 million, Peter Larson was jailed for two years. Sue is now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago, while Larson is still searching for and finding T. Rex skeletons.

Dinosaur 13 is one of those documentaries that makes no bones (excuse the pun) about its partisanship, and does its best to highlight the absurdities of a situation that could have been easily avoided if only a little background research had been done in the first place, and before anyone went looking for bones in the South Dakota soil. The excitement generated by Sue’s discovery sees the folks at the Black Hills Institute all but fall over themselves to retain her remains, but their lack of diligence in knowing who the land belonged to is scary (as are some of the later misdemeanours the movie reveals). However, the Government’s reaction is clearly disproportionate to what Larson and the rest actually did, and as the draconian efforts employed to convict them become clearer, the movie morphs from being about one of the greatest dinosaur finds in living memory – if not the greatest – into a cautionary tale about the way in which U.S. law can be used to punish a group of individuals.

In amongst the terrible injustices meted out to the various members of the Black Hills Institute, there are moments of bitter irony: Hendrickson becomes a state witness even though she has nothing to tell them, and when Larson is imprisoned, his intake papers show the reason for his incarceration as “failing to fill out paperwork”. Miller uses a variety of techniques to highlight and clarify the various events that happened, from interviews with those concerned – Larson’s ex-wife, Kristin, is particularly eloquent – to archival footage and pertinent television footage, to explanatory captions that move the story forward. It’s an engrossing movie that’s intelligently assembled and grabs the attention from the get go; by the end, you’re aghast at the ways in which everything went sour so quickly.

Rating: 8/10 – while Dinosaur 13 is clearly on the side of the people at the Black Hills Institute, and decries their treatment by the Government, it’s far more objective than it seems at first glance; leaving the passionate arguments on both sides for the people involved to express, the movie (thankfully) maintains its true focus on Sue and her sixty-five million year journey from the South Dakota hills to the bright lights of Chicago’s Field Museum.

Reasonable Doubt (2014)

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Court case, Crime, District attorney, Dominic Cooper, Gloria Reuben, Hit and run, Murder, Parolees, Peter Howitt, Revenge, Review, Samuel L. Jackson, Wife and child

D: Peter P. Croudins / 91m

Cast: Dominic Cooper, Samuel L. Jackson, Gloria Reuben, Ryan Robbins, Erin Karpluk, Dylan Taylor

Pop quiz: You’re a mega-successful district attorney who’s never lost a case. After a night out celebrating another win in court, and having had a few drinks, you still drive home because you’re worried your car might be stolen while you take a taxi. On the way, you hit and injure a man. Do you: a) call for an ambulance using your mobile phone and stay with the man until it arrives? b) call for an ambulance by using a pay phone and then drive off? or c) carry on driving and don’t look back? If you answered b, then give yourself a gold star.

This is what hot shot DA Mitch Brockden (Cooper) does, and inevitably it sets in motion a series of events that ends with his wife, Rachel (Karpluk) and newborn child Ella being put in mortal danger. In between those two events, Mitch gets an uncomfortable case of the guilts. When Clinton Davis (Jackson) is arrested with the injured man – who is now dead – in his car later that evening, Davis’s assertion that he had found the man and was trying to get him to a hospital rings true with Mitch, even though Davis has tools in his car that match the weapons that caused the man’s other injuries. When Davis is charged with the man’s murder, it’s Mitch who gets to prosecute him.

For reasons too tiresome and unlikely to reveal here, Mitch’s estranged step-brother Jimmy (Robbins) testifies at the trial that he saw the hit and run. Davis is freed. Soon after, another man is found dead with similar injuries. Mitch now believes Davis did kill the man he knocked down, and when investigating Detective Kanon (Reuben) mentions other incidents that Davis is connected to, Mitch is convinced of Davis’s guilt. He decides to investigate further, but soon finds that Davis is more dangerous than he expected.

It’s not that the whole scenario of Reasonable Doubt is far-fetched, or that the motivations of both Mitch and Davis are about as convincing as a politician’s probity, nor even that the level of credibility is undermined continually by Cooper’s lacklustre performance – he demonstrates guilt by looking as if his haemorrhoids are playing up – it’s more that no one stopped to take stock of the movie while it was being made and said, “Hold on, isn’t this just the biggest load of rubbish?” If someone had, then perhaps we’d all have been spared this poor excuse for a thriller. As it is, the audience has to endure scene after scene of disjointed dialogue, uncomfortable plot contrivances, woeful acting (Cooper and Reuben are the worst offenders), and such dreadful direction that Peter Howitt’s name is changed in the credits (see above).

It’s always frustrating when movies like this are made. Reasonable Doubt could have been so much better, but the script by Peter A. Dowling comes across as a hastily assembled first draft. There is very little internal logic on display, and what there is is so ridiculous that even if you suspended all credulity you’d still be asking yourself if what you were seeing was really happening. The character of Mitch bears no resemblance to anyone in real life, he makes risky decisions based more on the script’s need for him to do so than any actual self-motivation, and for someone who is so good at his job – so much so that he knows a judge’s decision before he even makes it – he makes one stupid mistake after another, until he ends up arrested for the attempted murder of his step-brother.

And then the movie presents us with it’s most ridiculous and stupid moment: after receiving a call from Davis who tells him he’s going to kill Rachel and Ella, and after he overpowers a police officer, Mitch walks out of the police station without being stopped and while carrying the police officer’s gun! He doesn’t even try to hide it, just walks out with it in his hand! It’s when a script offers this as a development, and no one stops to say “Hold on, isn’t this just the biggest load of complete rubbish?” that you know no one really cares. So why should the audience?

There are – amazingly – worse thrillers out there, but these are mostly low-budget affairs with semi-professional casts and inexperienced directors. Here, there’s a level of conspicuous ability but it’s all for nought. Even Jackson phones in his performance, giving us a less intense, less convincing version of his character from Meeting Evil (2012). You could say that Reasonable Doubt is so bad it’s mesmerising… but that would be a whole other load of rubbish.

Rating: 3/10 – dreadful thriller that insults its own cast as well as the audience; proof if any were needed that some movies should have their productions shut down after day one.