There is sympathy, warmth and directness – though perhaps not much in the sense of explicit joy – in this intensely English true story that made headlines and changed lives around the world.
Screenwriter Jack Thorne and director Ben Taylor dramatize the grief, tension and triumph that led to the very first birth of what the press, with a mixture of hostility and awe, called “a test-tube baby” – that is, a baby conceived through vitro fertilization – on July 25, 1978: a little girl named Louise Brown (middle name Joy).
It was a medical breakthrough whose decades-long development involved dogged but underfunded research, media resentment and personal tension. The resulting drama is watchable, if a bit functional, and sometimes feels like an adapted play.
James Norton plays pioneering biologist Robert Edwards, an optimistic Cambridge scientist impatient with the establishment’s resistance to his ideas; Bill Nighy, with his usual reserved elegance and gentle confidence, plays obstetrician Dr. Patrick Steptoe, whose revolutionary technique could make Edwards’ new ideas a reality – and most importantly, Thomasin McKenzie convincingly plays embryologist-nurse Jean Purdy, who drives the floating was the force behind the research, which she often conducted while caring for her ailing mother – aptly played here by Joanna Scanlan – and was the first person to recognize and describe the historic cluster of dividing cells.
In fact, Purdy’s scandalous exclusion from the official record after her heartbreakingly early death from cancer at age 39 is a later story that the film doesn’t touch on. (But the appearance here of DNA scientist James Watson – who led the moral panic against in vitro research – has historical echoes. He and two other men received their Nobel Prizes, while former colleague Rosalind Franklin, who also died young of cancer, was not remembered for years.)
Edwards, Steptoe and Purdy emerge from this film as the intellectual mavericks of fertility science – and there’s a sympathetic, easy-going rapport on screen between Norton, Nighy and McKenzie, as the trio doggedly continue their work, shuttling between Cambridge, where Edwards and Purdy were based, and Oldham, where Steptoe worked.
Muriel Harris, the hospital operating room supervisor, is formidably played by Tanya Moodie as a kind of composite ‘Matron’ figure, blending the real person with the NHS staff at large.
And what about the forces that turned against them as they fought to heal the secret pain of infertility? The disgusting, reactionary press – which is unwilling or unable to understand that IVF does not carry an increased risk of birth defects – is largely off camera and is always sharply dismissed in dialogue scenes, even though their long-term effect on the heroine and the heroes great. is not self-evident. Edwards gets into a (seemingly imaginary) TV debate with Watson, and the studio audience screams in dismay at the fake news that Watson is doing nothing to suppress. The medical establishment, in the form of the Medical Research Council, shrugs off their work – and Edwards wants to know if they would be more interested if it were a “male” issue: a smart point.
As for religious scruples, Thorne imagines a specifically religious tension between Purdy and her mother, perhaps creating a certain kind of side melodrama that the story didn’t really need. Inevitably, Purdy’s own childlessness comes to the fore and in the film Purdy is actually gynecologically examined by Bill Nighy’s caring and fatherly Steptoe as a kind of personal, professional favor for her – a rather bizarre moment, perhaps, but Nighy and McKenzie perform it out. cordially enough.
And so the trio’s story is gently portrayed, with McKenzie’s Jean cycling through picturesque Cambridge, including the courts of King’s College – and in other scenes settling down with Edwards for a highway lunch of eggs and chips on the way to or from Oldham. She’s the one on whom a personal toll is taken – the men are relatively unaffected – but even she doesn’t seem particularly exhausted. It is a somewhat staged reconstruction, but an accessible and human account of a great moment in scientific history.