The Winslow Boy (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com Member: Online Film Critics Society
***1/2 out of ****
"How little you know about men."
Starring Nigel Hawthorne, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon, Gemma Jones. Rated G.
David Mamet has long been my favorite screenwriter and director. With his distinctive, more often than not ingenious dialogue, and his laid back style of direction nearly all of his movies are absolutely irresistible. Some of them tend to be thickly layered, deceptive productions that require the audience to look at the film in a less superficial manner than the plot seems to require in order to discern its concealed message, or sometimes even a concealed storyline. And although the real plot in his new project The Winslow Boy is slightly more conspicuous than in some of his other endeavors, it is still a brilliantly complex, consistently riveting motion picture about honor, about sacrifice, and about the difference between what is commonly known as justice and what is right. Oh, and it's rated G.
Incidentally, this is the first time that Mamet has decided to adapt someone else's work; namely a play by Terrence Rattigan, set in the 19th Century. He casts Nigel Hawthorne in the lead role as Arthur Winslow, a rich, aging man who finds out that his 14 year old son Ronnie has been kicked out of the Naval Academy for allegedly stealing a 5 shilling postal note. "Did you do it?" he asks his boy. "No father, I didn't," Ronnie answers. That's enough for Arthur, who, with his oldest daughter (Rebecca Pidgeon), immediately starts a crusade to bring his son's case to court. They enlist the help of Sir Robert Morton, a notorious attorney to help them achieve that formidably daunting task.
It all seems fairly frivolous, and no matter how you look at it, the Winslow Case is not the trial of the century. But Arthur is determined to keep his family's word clean and he is willing to go quite far to make sure of that. Soon enough, Sir Robert Morton along with the rest of the country becomes equally wrapped up in the proceedings. So do we.
All David Mamet does for the script is tighten and hone the dialogue, but his style is still fairly apparent. The characters still talk in his trademark staccatto lines and there is still tension present in conversations that no ordinary writer would be able to make tense. But this is not Mamet's norm, and it's refreshing to see Mamet deviate from his world of crooks, gangsters as con men, wonderful as those films were.
Nigel Hawthorne's performance is nearly flawless. His delivery is that of a dignified yet not pompous man who seems to be getting beaten at his own game. We pity the man, but we also like him. Rebecca Pidgeon, David Mamet's wife, who gave a fairly awful performance in The Spanish Prisoner is at the top of her game here as Arthur's oldest daughter, a flailing feminist who gives her all to the Winslow case as a way for making up for her lack of success in the Women's Suffrage Movement.
The Winslow Boy is a wonderful movie that avoids cliches such as a seemingly inevitable courtroom scene and shoots higher -- it wants to make a real impact rather than a phony one. Be honest: did you feel anything profound at or after the courtroom scenes in films like A Time To Kill? If you wanted to but didn't, this is a movie for you. It is the epitome of subtlety: it's powerful without being too emotional, sad without even trying to be depressing.
David Mamet can churn out some great scripts, but in this movie he proves to those who ever doubted it once and for all that he is a hell of a director too. He is almost a national treasure. His films deserve their own genre. ©1999 Eugene Novikov‰
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
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