THE WINSLOW BOY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: David Mamet reworks the classic play
by Terence Rattigan. A 12-year-old boy accused of
stealing a five-shilling postal order maintains his
innocence. Like the Dreyfus case in France, this
legal case throws all of Britain into controversy.
Well-acted, but this film is too faithful to a
stage play that frustratingly distances the
audience from the characters and the action.
Rating: 6 (0 to 10), 1 (-4 to +4)
Every medium has its own constraints that pull it away from being realistic. Silent film acting is very much pantomime that must convey much more than photo-realism would. A three-act stage play must tell an entire story from three points in time. Each must have a single or perhaps two locations. This is why plays adapted to film often seem claustrophobic and stagebound. There is an entire art to adapting stage plays to the screen without making them unbearable. Connecting scenes set in the out of doors will frequently be inserted.
The play THE WINSLOW BOY by Terence Rattigan is an old favorite in England. Supposedly every little English hamlet with a theater company has performed it one time or another. It is a David and Goliath story or one small boy against the British Admiralty. A young naval cadet is accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order. The boy maintains his innocence but is expelled from school nonetheless. The Admiralty insists they need only satisfy themselves of his guilt. The Winslow family supports the boy and resolutely demands a trial. Meanwhile somehow the case gets national attention and the country is torn on the issue.
David Mamet has adapted the play for the screen and has added some generally inconsequential short scenes around the original major scenes. The major scenes all take place in the Winslow mansion, which means they are divorced from the action. In a more standard film format, the storyteller would have the choice of showing or not showing the stealing of the postal order and the resulting trial. A three-act stage play has too much territory to cover to have a scene at the school or in a courtroom. After the first scene in which we find the boy has been accused of the crime, suddenly and jarringly we jump forward months and the issue is already a national controversy. How such a minor issue could have become so important is totally lost. Most films would have many scenes covering the interim. And perhaps in Britain what happened might also be common knowledge. Here it appears like there is a great whopping chunk of missing narrative. One woman near me in the audience was convinced for a while that reels were being shown out of order because we had missed so much of the narrative.
The actors are all playing people of the British upper crust. They are people who have been trained to be dry and detached, even among their own family. This makes the film seem rather dry and bloodless though one has a good idea what emotions are going on just under the surface.
Guy Edwards plays the accused Ronnie Winslow and Nigel Hawthorne plays the father who is so standoffish to the boy but is willing to let his family be destroyed rather than allowing what he accepts as a false accusation stand. Much like Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen's AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, he clearly loves his family but is willing to let his health be ruined and his family be destroyed over a principle. The central characters however become Rebecca Pidgeon (of Mamet's THE SPANISH PRISONER) as Catherine Winslow, Ronnie's older sister, and Jeremy Northam as Sir Robert Morton, whom the family has defend Ronnie. There is a definite romantic tension between them on the screen. Both seem to recognize an attraction between each other but being oh-so-veddy- proper it always remains frustratingly just below the surface.
That seems to be the problem with THE WINSLOW BOY. There is just too much following of rules. The two main characters cannot get together; Mamet cannot show us the most dramatic scenes of the Winslow case. The whole thing is so correct and reserved that the viewer feels a little cheated when all is said and done (with too much on the screen said and not enough done). Mamet is to be commended for setting frustrating constraints on himself and for sticking with them at the expense of dramatic impact. But he probably should have cheated a little to make this a better narrative. I rate THE WINSLOW BOY 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1999 Mark R. Leeper
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews