Shaun de Waal Movie of the week
At first sight, the pairing of Terence Rattigan and David Mamet is an unlikely match. Epithets often applied to Mamet’s works on stage and screen since his 1970s debut include “abrasive”, “scathing”, “savage”. He has been accused of misogyny; as a writer he glories in unsyntactical colloquialism and has a penchant for profanity.
Is this the man to remake The Winslow Boy, a late-Forties hit play and film by a very English playwright, a master of clipped repartee in the drawing room?
As it turns out, the match is an excellent one. Mamet has found in Rattigan’s formal, brittle upper-class speech a tension between what is said and what is not, or what is said and what is meant. He may have Mametised Rattigan’s language a little, making it faster and more slippery, but the period feel is never lost, and the way he builds the sense of something urgent below the urbanity effectively crystallises the work’s concern with appearance and reality.
A problem of adapting plays to the screen, especially those confined to limited indoor space, is how to “open them out”. The original Anthony Asquith movie has a longer set-up and the odd excursion into locations other than the Winslow family’s house – obvious but redundant ones like a visit to the Admiralty – besides the court-room scenes. Mamet is happy to let key events happen off-screen, denying himself even a crowd-pleasing court-room confrontation (though he does have a quick carriage-dash through London). Rather, he goes back to the play itself and uses the camera to enliven the house-bound action.
In Mamet’s masterful opening, the Winslows arrive home from church in a flurry of wet- weather clothing and overlapping chatter, dad Arthur proleptically repeating the service’s Bible-reading (seven years of plenty, seven years of famine …) and commanding the removal of the uncivilised gramophone. The scene is swiftly set and the plot put in motion by rapid dialogue and fluid movement through two or three rooms, the closed space both emphasised and punctuated by the doors that open and close even as disclosures are made – the engagement of a daughter, the disgrace of a son.
This first act, as it were, revolves around Nigel Hawthorne’s pivotal performance as Arthur Winslow, the Edwardian patriarch who will not accept the dismissal of his son Ronnie (Guy Edwards) from naval school for alleged theft. Whatever the cost (and it will be high, financially and otherwise), Arthur pursues the matter until it reaches Parliament and becomes a national scandal. With exemplary sensitivity and subtlety Hawthorne portrays a complex man, severe but loving, self-doubting but stubborn.
At a certain point, though, it is as though the main character of the piece ceases to be Arthur Winslow and becomes Sir Robert Morton, the celebrity barrister and MP who takes on the case. (Isn’t it a conflict of interest, raising the issue in the House?) The Forties film had ageing heartthrob Robert Donat making a meal of the part; here, Jeremy Northam provides as silky a silk as anyone could want.
The other key role is that of suffragette Catherine Winslow, so utterly her father’s daughter – and, thanks to clever casting, clearly her brother’s sister. Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon plays Catherine, her brother Matthew plays brother Dickie Winslow. She is very fine in the role: the air practically crackles in her interactions with the icily aloof, apparently mercenary barrister.
And Mamet pulls it all together (though one must wonder about the pinned-up enlargement of a dodgy signature – in 1912?). He shows, in what would at first seem to be an atypical outing, a further kinship with the British drama that taught him the power of Pinterish ellipsis.