*** (out of ****)
Starring Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Bill Nighy, Marc Blucas, Tara FitzGerald, Sinead Cusack, and Henry Cavill
Directed by Tim Fywell & written for the screen by Heidi Thomas, from the novel by Dodie Smith
2003 R
“I Capture the Castle” is about girls who keep journals and fill them with too many adjectives and analogies. It has beautiful, semi-emaciated sisters looking out the window and longingly talking to one another about love, wondering if they’ll ever get married. It has artsy-fartsy women in long, flowing dresses adorned with beads and bracelets. We confront the eternal question, which is whether to marry for love or money, and plot-crucial conversations are overheard from second-story windows. We see Boy A, who loves Girl B so much that he’ll do anything to make her happy, even though that means helping her be with Boy C. We get to see one of the sisters run distraught into bed, clutch the covers, and weep about how “my life is ruined!” or something to that effect. To that dialogue let us also add “I shall never marry,” “I knew she was ill,” “we didn’t know how to be women,” and “I was in the hayloft.”
As befits a movie of this kind, it is a based on a novel that, because of its cross-generational popularity, has earned it the epithet of “beloved.” We know it’s an arthouse indie-movie because it can’t start until we’ve sat through about fifteen different logos for production companies like Samuel Goldwyin and the BBC.
But before you start to worry that this isn’t your cup of tea and crumpets served on a late Victorian saucer—and maybe it is—don’t stop reading just yet. Several factors not only save “I Capture the Castle” from being an overwrought melodrama, but actually make it a sweet and tender film. The tone of the movie is like a good parent whose twelve-year-old has just declared “my true love is lost, I shall never love again, and all is ruin!” The good parent knows the child’s loss is just nonsense, forgotten in a matter of weeks. But the good parent sooths the child anyway. “I Capture the Castle” is like that: it knows that its characters are being silly children, but it loves them anyway.
“I Capture the Castle” understands and respects the predicaments of its characters, but is not so stuffy that it can’t poke fun at them. The film features an open parody of the English tea-time scene, in which the piano is out of tune, the girl is too flirtatious without being any good at it, and one of the American guests mutters “oh God.” When the young heroine is frantically scribbling in her diary we get whacked-out, intentionally overwrought camera angles and music, like a nudge in the ribs for fans of Merchant-Ivory. And as for the fantastic image of the trembling bride on her wedding night, confronted by a shirtless pillar of unflinching manhood—well, enough said. All this makes it easy for us to empathize with the characters when their childish game-playing turns into genuinely wrong decisions.
The time is Between World Wars and the castle of the title is a crumbling feudal stronghold in the English countryside. In it we meet a family of eccentrics, headed by a writer who hasn’t written a word in twelve years; his loopy second wife, who likes to run naked around the moor; their two vastly different daughters; and their brainy grade school son. All was mirth and excitement when the author (Bill Nighy) first brought his family to the castle twelve years ago. Fresh from the success of his first novel, he was shouting boldly from the turrets, much to the smiling amazement of his offspring.
But now all is not well. The family lives on the edge of poverty, the castle leaks, and they have little to no contact with the outside world. The elder of the daughters (Rose Byrne) is fast approaching marrying age and is so disgusted with their lot that she is desperate to marry into money. We see the story through the eyes of the younger daughter (Romola Garai), who is skeptical about Byrne’s mercenary motives…and then the handsome new landlord, fresh from America, comes strolling by, with his equally handsome brother in tow…
The brothers (Henry Thomas and Marc Blacus) are little more than boys. Having lived in isolation for so long, the eccentricities of the author’s wife (Tara FitzGerald) and the older daughter’s out-dated ideas of courtship prove to be stumbling blocks to the joining of the two families. Then there are the suspicions that the girls may just be gold-diggers. Then there is the envy of the author’s wife when she notices that the landlord’s single mother (Sinead Cusack) may be more of an inspiration to her husband than she ever was. Then there’s the boy (Henry Cavill) who’s been laboring in the castle, without pay, for six months, and you know why every time young Romola Garai is in a room with him. And all the while, she is trying her best to discover the rules of love, which are all new to her, and renegotiate this new moral territory.
Yes, the line “we didn’t know how to be women” is a bit corny, but what is adolescence if not the realization that there is a new thing required of you, even though you don’t know what it is? Throw in an engagement and a love triangle, or possibly a quadrangle or a pentagram, and there’s enough to keep you busy.
Two major discoveries are made by the characters involving amore. Granted, they fall in love with each other, in various combinations, but this doesn’t happen as early as they think it does. First they fall in love with the taste of being in love. The girls and boys in “I Capture the Castle” have, of course, long wondered about romance before we meet them. But we join them at that moment when matters of the heart are moving from pure imagination into something just barely real, yet giddily, dangerously unknown. Garai’s fantasy about one of the boys ends prematurely because, although she knows mechanically what’s supposed to happen next, she just can’t quite wrap her head around it. When a couple embraces for the first time, it is tenderly, fearfully, even apologetically. Everyone is still young enough to put lust after love; no one has been hurt or become cynical enough to reverse that order, although maybe some of them have reached that unfortunate point by the end of the film.
The movie captures that newness of adolescent romance and it is this innocence that draws us to our protagonists. They make mistakes that are hurtful but no one is intentionally cruel. In my generation I think most of us were younger when we began to notice mutual attractions, yet “I Capture the Castle” vividly recalls that atmosphere, despite being in a different time, place, and age group. The advantage of our generation is that when we started to stupidly fall in love we were generally expected to wait a few more years before throwing marriage in as well.
Finished August 7, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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