In England, for decades and continuing as late as 1970, children from the slums were taken away from their parents and promised “Oranges and Sunshine” — as they were transported to Australia. The children were told their parents were dead; the parents were told their babies had been adopted by better families.
This information, first discovered in the 1980s, is still shocking but it doesn’t quite make a movie. Emily Watson, giving a performance so restrained it borders on absent, plays a social worker who stumbles across the secret, which the British government hadn’t acknowledged.
On trips to Australia, the social worker gradually uncovers the details of the mass deportation, meeting adults who were victimized as children (Hugo Weaving plays an emotionally damaged deportee who was made to work on a farm). But as both a mystery and an underdog tale, the movie is largely inert, except for a couple of unlikely horror-movie moments. When the social worker tells her superiors what she has learned, they encourage her. When she asks for a year off to investigate, they offer two.
Making a true story of social injustice into a gripping narrative requires more imagination than is contained in this well-intentioned but uninspired effort.