Winslow Boy -

Many thought The Winslow Boy was an odd choice of material for David Mamet. It was originally a Terence Rattigan play from 1946, taken from a true incident in England in 1908 about a boy, 13, discharged from Royal Naval College for allegedly stealing and cashing a five-shilling postal order. The boy's father, Arthur Winslow (Nigel Hawthorne), mounts a lengthy and expensive legal campaign to clear his boy's and by extension his own name, with the rallying cry, Let right be done! The resultant notoriety, the dwindling fortune of the Winslows, as well as the punishment this pressure exacts on them, form the surface action of the story. Yet underneath the staid manners of the dialogue there roils a whole emotional life hardly hinted at in the actors' faces. The famous lawyer engaged to defend the boy, Sir Robert Morton (Jeremy Northam), makes a suitable sparring partner for the Winslows' daughter, Catherine (Rebecca Pidgeon), a suffragette whose suitors are scared off by the family's legal battle. The unspoken romance between these two is more the point than whether right is done or not. Pidgeon brings the same inscrutable countenance that complicated her role in Mamet's previous film, The Spanish Prisoner, to this film--but here everybody seems to have it. As the differences between appearance and actuality reconcile themselves, Mamet builds bridges to his other works, House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, for instance, for the ways in which dialogue is a cover for someone's true nature. The Winslow Boy is masterful in its quiet treatment of human mysteries. --Jim Gay ...