Audrey’s Children Review: Natalie Dormer Delivers Her Career-Best Performance in the Biopic of Dr Audrey Evans
I first saw Natalie Dormer in the TV’s The Tudors, which also happened to be her breakthrough performance, and she did great in Game of Thrones and the last two Hunger Games: Mockingjay. Then comes Audrey’s Children, where she plays Dr Audrey Evans, a real-life figure whose title refers to her patients. She prefers holistic care, including displaying her impressive bedside manner and giving emotional support to the sick children.
She has, of course, achieved medical breakthroughs in treating pediatric cancer called neuroblastoma using her namesake Evans Staging System. Her method has remarkably reached a whopping 80% survival rate for children with cancer as opposed to the previous 10% when she first started. Such a true story deserves to be told on the screen, and Dormer is the perfect fit for the role. She’s the heart and soul of Ami Canaan Mann’s latest movie, her first since 2014’s romantic drama Jackie & Ryan before spending most of her time directing episodes for television series like The Blacklist, Shooter and House of Cards.
Dormer is given ample room to showcase her dramatic acting prowess with her committed performance as the steadfast physician, who has dedicated her life to finding a cure for the aforementioned disease. It was undoubtedly her career-best performance to date since she made her acting debut in 2005. Beyond her tireless medical research, including running multiple tests that don’t sit well with most doctors and those from the higher management, she has to deal with sexism and misogyny.
It was 1969 after all, and time was different back then when she first worked as the Chief of Pediatric Oncology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a.k.a. CHOP. A protégé of Dr Sidney Farber, the pediatric pathologist who revolutionised chemotherapy for cancer treatment, who can be seen in the opening black-and-white archival footage, Audrey subsequently joins forces with Dr Dan D’Angio (Jimmi Simpson). The latter is an oncologist who doesn’t get along with Audrey when they first meet due to their different work ethics.
Then, there’s Dr C. Everett Koop (Clancy Brown), the head physician who brought in Audrey but begins to question her rebellious way of breaking the hospital rules. And yet, this is what Audrey does best, no matter whether other doctors find her unconventional method controversial, because all she cares about is saving as many children as she can.
This is one of the biopics where a singular performance from an actor helps to carry a movie, even if it suffers from muted or perfunctory storytelling. Julia Fisher Farbman’s screenplay treads familiar ground with the usual biopic formula, while Ami Canaan Mann’s direction is competent in handling her actors, including solid supporting turns from Jimmi Simpson and Clancy Brown, other than Dormer’s scene-stealing performance.
For a biopic that deals with a difficult subject matter, the fact that the movie is rated PG feels like it should belong in the PG-13 territory. It doesn’t help either that Mann decides to play safe with the subject. Whereas Audrey’s Children spends a lot of time emphasizing the main character’s work in the hospital, the movie is less inclined to explore her personal life outside her profession. Sure, there are a few scenes whenever she’s not at work, but the movie rather glosses them over without delving much into Audrey’s life.
The technical credits, including Jon Keng’s cinematography, along with Amber Unkle’s production design and Sarah Maiorino’s costume design, all do an adequate job of capturing the yesteryear feel and look of the 1960s era. Audrey’s Children isn’t much of a great biopic that it could have achieved otherwise, but the movie remains a decent watch, thanks largely to Natalie Dormer’s top-notch performance.
