THE WINSLOW BOY (68)

Directed by: David Mamet

Starring: Nigel Hawthorne, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon

The Pitch: A naval cadet is expelled for stealing a postal order ; his father, determined that Right should prevail, nearly ruins himself trying to prove the boy's innocence.

Theo Sez: Not a totally successful experiment - though it starts and finishes splendidly - partly because it bogs down a bit in the second act (the family's travails and sacrifices in pursuing the case), which in turn is partly because Pidgeon isn't strong enough to carry it : her woodenness was effective in THE SPANISH PRISONER (some of us were fooled into thinking it deliberate), but it's just wooden here, a glazed opacity - it'd be interesting to know whether the line about how "you can never tell what she's feeling" was part of the original play or inserted for the occasion. In fact, it'd be interesting to know just how much (or how little) Mamet adapted the play at all, not just because the rhythms are often so Mamet-like - repetitions, overlapping dialogue, quibbling about words - but also because the whole thing seems based around forestalling smugness (as in the smugness we might feel towards a 50-year-old play) : we might dismiss the priggish fiancé out of hand, yet in fact he leaves with a great deal of dignity (security's important, he tells our heroine, "you can't shame me into saying it's not"), just as we might shake our heads patronisingly at the Northam character's antiquated views on feminism - yet he gets the last word, his delightful riposte one-upping the heroine's 'enlightened' put-down. It's a film made with love - for its characters' mannerly sense of decency, for their "I need hardly tell you" and "I venture to think" way of speaking, for a quietly intelligent kind of writing that allows important events to take place offscreen and can use a quote without stopping everything dead to spell out where it's from - which may be why it grows in the memory, seems increasingly close to perfect the more you think about it ; but, with the best will in the world, you have to admit it drags a little.