Photo courtesy of Sony Picture Classics
David Mamet is the Shakespeare of streetwise American dialogue. The Pulitzer-winning playwright is the author of the gritty American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, but his long career includes many other facets. Aside from writing extensively on Jewish traditions, Mamet has taken stands placing him on the Right wing of American (and Israeli) opinion. He has also accumulated a long resume in film as screenwriter and director. One of his most surprising projects was his 1999 film The Winslow Boy, just released on Amazon.
Mamet adapted The Winslow Boy from Terrence Rattigan’s 1946 drawing room drama and his screenplay maintains Rattigan’s polished tone. Speaking in perfect King’s English, Winslow’s characters keep their emotions tightly corseted and their anger restrained. It’s a coded language utterly unlike the dialogue for which Mamet is best known.
The setting is an upper middle-class London family on the eve of what would be called the Great War. The Winslows live in a comfortably appointed townhouse; their servant opens the front door for them as they return from Sunday services and serves tea on a silver platter. The marriage plans for daughter Catherine (Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon) are dictated by a shrewd combination of love and economics. The father, Arthur (veteran British thespian Nigel Hawthorne), is skeptical and emotionally complicated. He tends to see his oldest son Dickie (Matthew Pidgeon) as a disappointment and invests his emotional capital in 13-year old Ronnie.
Little wonder then that Ronnie stands outside for many minutes in the pouring rain, afraid to enter his home. He has been expelled from naval cadets school for theft, a crime he adamantly denies, and is afraid of his father’s reaction. Arthur’s response is to go to war with the naval school, battling the Royal Navy—that lynchpin in those years of Britain’s imperial might—and by extension the British government. He fully embraces Ronnie’s side of the story and spares no expense in pursuing every angle of appeal, employing the expensive, well-connected barrister Sir Robert Morton (Jeremy Northam). Perhaps it’s no surprise that Arthur cuts off Dickie’s Oxford tuition and spends the money on Ronnie’s defense, given the subtle fissures between father and oldest son. Arthur continues to drain the family fortune and as the case drags on, their elegant house grows more disheveled.
Drawn loosely from a true story, Rattigan’s play may have appealed to Mamet’s libertarian impulses through Arthur’s struggle against the blind, obstinate dictates of a bureaucracy that wronged his son. His stand complicates the situation, bringing national attention to a small problem that could have been brushed under the carpet. The press avidly covers the story—Mamet’s film never explains why but cuts away periodically to grungy press shops where the latest editions are typeset—and public interest is high. The Winslow case is debated in Parliament.
Arthur isn’t exactly a “little man” fighting the system—he’s the director of a bank—but relative to the institutions with which he contends, he’s David to their Goliath.
Mamet’s other interest may concern the value of truth. In his book The Wicked Son, he writes about “the mawkish falseness in the lies of others; no one has ever lied his way out of an obligation without being aware that his falsity was apparent.”
Ronnie’s determined denial (“I didn’t do it! Really, I didn’t!”) strike Arthur and Sir Robert as a touchstone of honesty. Before taking the case, Robert even tries to trip up Ronnie—entangling him in evasions—but the boy sticks so unswervingly to his story that the lawyer concludes that the truth is being told.
“How much better,” Mamet writes in a different context, “to have spoken the truth, whose inconvenience, to them, however great, could never, if they knew it, compensate them for their forfeiture of our esteem.”
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