Imagine you went into hospital for routine surgery on an in-growing toenail, only to stumble out dazed by the news that every organ in your body was diseased, the prognosis getting progressively grimmer with each new person you talk to. It’s not the most elegant analogy, but it’s something akin to the experience of the Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys.
In 1986 she looked into the case of a woman who wanted to find out who she was before, at the age of 4, she was loaded on to a ship with hundreds of other children and transported from Britain to Australia. What Humphreys discovered was an international scandal: the systematic failure of both British and Australian governments to protect the interests of the most vulnerable of their citizens. Children who were told they were orphaned when in many cases their parents were still living were shipped to the other side of the world to live in orphanages, where many suffered appalling abuse.
The story of Humphreys’s mission to right the wrongs done to these children is the subject of the first feature film from the television director Jim Loach. The son of Ken Loach, he is clearly cut from the same cloth as his father. The same compassionate humanism infuses the film, the same workmanlike, resolutely unflashy directing style — Loach permits himself the occasional crane shot but that’s as showy as it gets.
With this kind of solid, competently no-frills film-making, the emphasis falls automatically on to the script and the performances. But while the latter are mostly first-rate, the screenplay is less confident. It’s as if the screenwriter Rona Munro, like Humphreys herself, was daunted and horrified by the scale of the transportation and the huge numbers of lives potentially ruined. While there are several wrenchingly powerful moments, the film as a whole lacks sureness in the storytelling.
The film’s stand-out asset is Emily Watson as the quietly crusading Mrs Humphreys. Watson’s real gift to the film is her ability to listen with every fibre of her body. Her performance is largely reactive. She absorbs the heartbreaking stories of the children who were taught to believe they had no worth, soaking up their pain like blotting paper, her eyes flickering with the tears they no longer know how to shed. A scene in which she confronts the monks who routinely terrorised the boys in their care is terrific — a contained, neat little woman, she swells and spits fire with every word. Moments like this confirm that Loach has inherited his father’s passion as well as his cinematic aesthetic.
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Director Jim Loach, 15, 105 mins