# Winslow Boy, The (1999)

### reviewed by
Kleszczewski, Nicholas

    The Winslow Boy

Hitchcock would never claim to be an actor's director. His emphasis was in letting the casting do the work, and was far more interested in the structure of the film, with each of the actors being used as pawns.

David Mamet once wrote that his style is built on the same premise. Never mind with emoting or getting into character, or finding the person's interior motivation. Whooey. Come up with an ingenius screenplay, an intricate puzzle, and cast actors who you trust will be believable from the get-go.

To say David Mamet's name is to conjure up some of his great works. Not only is he an accomplished playwright (_Speed-the-Plow_,_GlenGarry Glen Ross_) and screenwriter (_The Untouchables_) but he has two movies in his repertoire that would have made Hitchcock proud. _House of Games_ and last year's _The Spanish Prisoner_. If you haven't seen them yet, do so.

So it is with this anticipation that I went to see _The Winslow Boy_, his latest. It is altogether unique that it is the first film I've known in a long, long, while that is rated G, but the film is really for adults. The foul-mouthed characters of his R-rated films must be giggling somewhere.

Want a simple plot? Pre-teen Ronnie Winslow has just been expelled from military school, with accusations that he has stolen a postal order. He claims innocence. His father believes in him, and spends his estate's riches to prove so. That's _it_.

Want a cruel joke? This film has all the components of a Hitchcock film, only without Hitchcock. You have the premise of the wrongly accused, only to not follow it up with who actually did it. We don't even see the too much of the courtroom, and the triumphant climax is performed off-screen.

Instead, Mamet is far more concerned with the tensions within the family. The patriarch (played effortlessly by Nigel Hawthorne), is quirky and dignified, tough, caring, but a little reckless. So the daughter (Rebecca Pidgeon) has no dowry for her engagement. So the elder son (Matthew Pidgeon) can't go to college.

Okay, fine. But if false expectations can ruin a film, it certainly does so here. The film is passable, but I long for the bite of the earlier Mamet. This has nothing to do with the G rating. It has to do with showing scenes that I expected to see.

Back to the actors-as-pawns directing methodology. Such a style works as far as the actors themselves are well cast. Hawthorne--brilliant. Jeremy Northam--fabulous. Rebecca Pidgeon--huh?

The poor girl just plain can't act. It would have been better if her words were annunciated by a monotone voice-emulator than for her to say her lines. I gave her the benefit of the doubt in _Prisoner_, only because I just didn't know who she was. But here she is, at the beginnings of the suffrage movement, angry that she cannot marry, and she has the same, pause, utterance-of-lines-and-no-more schtick.

I can enjoy period pieces as the next guy, and I can appreciate it when the director goes out on a limb to try something new. However, _The Winslow Boy_ bored me.

    Nick Scale (1 to 10): 6

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