Moviola
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Moviola brings the best in cinema to your community, wherever you live in the UK – in the last year nearly 2,000 film shows for 125,000 people.
Kilmington shows the films on a wide screen in the village hall with seating for 100. The first showing in Kilmington was in March 2005 with the film “Vanity Fair”. Since it started until December 2015 we have shown 74 films selling 5,661 tickets and raising £13,075 for the Village Hall funds. |
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The Children Act (12A)
Wednesday 6th March 2019
Wednesday 6th March 2019
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The Children Act is a high-minded, stately drama, directed by Richard Eyre and adapted by Ian McEwan from his 2014 novel; it stars Emma Thompson as a brilliant and widely admired judge, Fiona Maye, on whose decisions the fate of various barristers and clients depend.
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Fiona’s ruling in a uniquely painful case concerning a desperately sick teenage boy coincides with her own marital crisis, which we are given to understand is crucially bound up with her childlessness.
There is at all times an elegant exposition of detail. This is a world of successful, well-off people working late at night in tastefully furnished homes listening to classical music while their quizzical spouses ask if they are coming to bed. We see a semi-breakdown in public, a climactic private scene with tears, but never a real explosion of energy. There is great wit and style here, and of course no lack of wit and style in Emma Thompson’s performance – it is a cousin, perhaps, to her radical lawyer Gareth Peirce in Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film In the Name of the Father.
The case itself could hardly be more contemporary and urgent, with parallels to the Charlie Gard case. Fiona is asked to rule on the matter of the married parents (played by Ben Chaplin and Eileen Walsh) of a boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead) just shy of 18 years old and adulthood, who is suffering from cancer. They are Jehovah’s Witnesses and will not permit him the simple blood transfusion which would save his life. But because Adam is a legal minor, Fiona can make decisions in his interests which would go against the parents’ religious scruples – which Adam appears to share.
Almost every week, Fiona has to deal with some Solomonic dilemma and she does so with enormous professionalism and conscientiousness. But it has taken a terrible toll on her marriage and her academic husband Jack – a slightly sketchily written role with which Stanley Tucci does his best – candidly tells her he’s thinking of having an affair. He moves out and as Fiona grapples with the crushing ethical dilemma, she must also think what her life has been about.
It is a highly watchable drama of the highly educated public-servant class – it would make a good stage-play – and the film is put together with an intelligence which saves it from being preposterous, although that’s a bit of a close thing.
There is at all times an elegant exposition of detail. This is a world of successful, well-off people working late at night in tastefully furnished homes listening to classical music while their quizzical spouses ask if they are coming to bed. We see a semi-breakdown in public, a climactic private scene with tears, but never a real explosion of energy. There is great wit and style here, and of course no lack of wit and style in Emma Thompson’s performance – it is a cousin, perhaps, to her radical lawyer Gareth Peirce in Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film In the Name of the Father.
The case itself could hardly be more contemporary and urgent, with parallels to the Charlie Gard case. Fiona is asked to rule on the matter of the married parents (played by Ben Chaplin and Eileen Walsh) of a boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead) just shy of 18 years old and adulthood, who is suffering from cancer. They are Jehovah’s Witnesses and will not permit him the simple blood transfusion which would save his life. But because Adam is a legal minor, Fiona can make decisions in his interests which would go against the parents’ religious scruples – which Adam appears to share.
Almost every week, Fiona has to deal with some Solomonic dilemma and she does so with enormous professionalism and conscientiousness. But it has taken a terrible toll on her marriage and her academic husband Jack – a slightly sketchily written role with which Stanley Tucci does his best – candidly tells her he’s thinking of having an affair. He moves out and as Fiona grapples with the crushing ethical dilemma, she must also think what her life has been about.
It is a highly watchable drama of the highly educated public-servant class – it would make a good stage-play – and the film is put together with an intelligence which saves it from being preposterous, although that’s a bit of a close thing.
Read more about Moviola at www.moviola.org
