DaytonDailyNews.com

Verdict: A winner.

Details: Starring Nigel Hawthorne and Jeremy Northam. Directed by David Mamet. Rated G. 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Review: David Mamet, purveyor of conniving con artists and foul-mouthed real estate salesmen, hardly seems anyone's ideal choice as the man to film "The Winslow Boy," a 1946 play by refined British playwright Terence Rattigan.

But, ever the trickster, Mamet turns out to be a perfect match for the material. Much as in Mamet's own work — this is his sixth movie as a director but the first based on someone else's writing — almost everything in "The Winslow Boy" happens off-screen. What's on-screen is a superbly well-observed character study in which events in themselves are secondary to their impact on the various members of the Winslow family.

Rattigan's play, previously filmed in 1948 with Robert Donat and Margaret Leighton, is loosely based on the true story of an upper-middle-class Edwardian patriarch's fight to clear his 13-year-old son's name.

As the movie opens — the year is 1912 — everything is as it should be in Arthur Winslow's (Nigel Hawthorne) quietly prosperous London home. Perhaps his older son, Dickie (Matthew Pidgeon), might be more settled — say, at the bank, like his father — but he's suitably enrolled at Oxford. And perhaps his only daughter, Catherine (Rebecca Pidgeon), might be less of an outspoken feminist, but at least she's about to announce her engagement to an acceptable young man.

Then comes the news: Young Ronnie (Guy Edwards) has been expelled from Osbourne Naval College for stealing a five-shilling postal note (American translation: pocket change).

The boy says he's innocent. The father believes him. So much so that he's willing to sacrifice everything — his wealth, his standing in the community, his family's happiness — to see the expulsion overturned in court.

When the case is taken by Sir Robert Morton (Jeremy Northam), a barrister as flamboyant as he is famous, it becomes a national cause. The Winslows are ridiculed, pilloried, even supported, but in any event, they become virtual public property.

The wonderful thing about both the play and the film is that Ronnie's true guilt or innocence is less the point than a subtle yet poignantly relentless examination of the cost of seeking what one feels is just. At what point does a fight for principle become a kind of personal arrogance? It's made clear that the boy has happily enrolled at another school. His past would be just that — past — if, as Mrs. Winslow (Gemma Jones) points out, her husband could let things go. "No one needed to know (of Ronnie's expulsion) if you hadn't shouted it out loud," she says.

There's not much shouting out loud in "The Winslow Boy." But there's a hushed, well-bred urgency in almost every scene. Mamet has handled what could've come off as an old chestnut astonishingly well — with care and thoughtfulness and a certain theatrical spark.

It helps that his cast — from Hawthorne's sadly brave Arthur to Northam's surprisingly moral Morton — is so good. The sole exception is Rebecca Pidgeon.

Married to Mamet in real life (she's also the sister of cast member Matthew Pidgeon), she's appeared — with varying degrees of success — in her husband's "Homicide" and "The Spanish Prisoner."

She's not terrible, but Catherine is such a plum role that one longs for the ardent appeal of, say, a young Katharine Hepburn.

Still, Mrs. Mamet's shortcomings aren't enough to ruin this otherwise smart and oddly daring movie. "Let Right Be Done" becomes the national catch phrase for the boy's cause. In this case, it has been.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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