Law and order

>> David Mamet goes period with The Winslow Boy

by MATTHEW HAYS

A stuffy British period piece is perhaps the last place--besides giant digital dinosaurs--you'd expect to find playwright and filmmaker David Mamet. With films like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner under his belt, the director's rep is decidedly contemporary and American.

But Mamet's films are populated with characters whose motivations are often quite mysterious and ambiguous. The director has a penchant for unresolved, conflicted souls at the centre of quirky plots. Thus Mamet would probably have a good grasp of the British stiff upper lip, that code for emotional repression that runs throughout The Winslow Boy.

Mamet has adeptly translated Terence Rattigan's 1946 play, which was based on an actual incident from 1912. Nigel Hawthorne (best known for his exceptional turn in The Madness of King George) plays an upright British banker, horrified to learn that his youngest offspring (Guy Edwards) has been expelled from a chichi college for allegedly stealing something from a fellow student. In one of the film's many excellent scenes, Hawthorne calls his son into his study and simply asks the boy, three times over, "Did you do it?" When Edwards, as the Winslow boy, answers no every time, Hawthorne takes his word for it.

In what could then be seen as either an act of unswerving pride or boundless stupidity, Hawthorne decides to challenge the college's decision to expel his son. What begins as a small incident soon turns into a massive legal battle, with the media blowing it into a circus.

Mamet has created an anti-courtroom drama here; scenes in court are kept to a bare minimum. Instead, Mamet hones in on the dire effects the never-ending trial has on the Winslow clan. Hawthorne's daughter (Rebecca Pidgeon) loses her fiancé after her dowry is sucked dry by mounting legal fees. The once-financially comfortable Winslows are shown, subtly, to be losing ground (shots indicate a more and more sparsely furnished home).

The film's best moments come after hotshot London lawyer (Jeremy Northam, playing a cross between Alan Dershowitz and Johnny Cochrane) is hired by the family to win the case. The shades of O.J. get more pronounced as the trial becomes a national obsession. Mamet, in turn, keeps the audience obsessed, maintaining his characters' ambiguous intentions--and the boy's questionable innocent status--to the very bitter end.

The Winslow Boy opens Friday, July 2