LET RIGHT BE DONE
THE WINSLOW BOY Directed by David Mamet Screenplay by Mamet from the play by Terence Rattigan With Nigel Hawthorne, Rebecca Pidgeon Grand Illusion G 110 min
Somebody run a DNA test on David Mamet, and fast! The expletive- happy playwright/filmmaker ("Glengarry, Glen Ross", etc.) has produced a G-rated movie; the master of painfully self-conscious pseudo- naturalistic *dialogue interruptus* has turned out an eloquent period drama; and it's marvelous.
Mamet has adapted the Terence Rattigan stage play based on a celebrated British court case from the early part of this century. A boy is cashiered from military school for stealing. His father, convinced of his son's innocence, fights the case first in the school and then in the courts, putting a tremendous strain on his family's financial and emotional resources, and catching the imagination of an enthralled British public. The boy's suffragette sister champions his cause though it wreaks havoc with her private life. Buttons crop up all over London, songs are written, cartoonists and editorial writers opine in newspapers, and even Parliament is tied up with hot debates on the merits of the Winslow Boy's situation. One of London's leading barristers takes an interest in his case -- and inevitably, past initial friction, in his sister as well.
Nigel Hawthorne ("The Madness of King George") delivers an extraordinary performance that should once again land him in the thick of the Oscar race. His Arthur Winslow is never quite what you expect. Our first impression is of a typically stern Victorian patriarch, but he immediately begins extending that character with humor, shyness, irony, tenderness, loyalty, and a perseverance that takes a toll on his health and family but not on his convictions.
Rebecca Pidgeon, the resident Mrs. Mamet, is Catherine Winslow, whose uncompromising dedication to principle has made her a leader in the battle for women's rights; when her brother's rights are compromised, she brings the same cool fire and perseverance to clearing his name. Pidgeon, who made Mamet's stylized dialogue work so well in "The Spanish Prisoner", here has a more nuanced character to work with, and she takes full advantage. And there's an equally fine job from Jeremy Northam ("Emma") as the great lawyer, a man with the legal mind of a Clarence Darrow and the dark handsomeness and tightly controlled emotional fires of a Heathcliffe.
The movie is exquisitely lit by cinematographer Benoit Delhomme ("The Scent of Green Papaya") with a conscious debt to the contemporaneous American painter John Singer Sargeant. Mamet's writing is economical, powerful, and moving, and his direction is controlled and sure. He has burnished his characters with such sharp definition that they move through his atmosphere like planets in the service of an integrated theory of the universe. You watch this celestial clockwork with a profound appreciation of the individual elements, and of the mind that shaped the whole.
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