**/****
starring Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas
screenplay by Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith
directed by Tim Fywell
by Walter Chaw A breezy light romantic caste-comedy in the vein of Cold Comfort Farm or any of a number of Jane Austens, Tim Fywell's mannered comedy of manners I Capture the Castle is marked by some fine performances and hampered by a blueprint so threadbare that it has, by now, taken on something of its own unnatural half-life. Boasting one of the less revolting endlessly reproducible master-plots that needs only a new cast and crew to bring it shambling to Frankenstein-ian life, the heavy-booted I Capture the Castle lumbers from meet-cute to early-hate-into-blossoming-love to the idea of 'marrying poetically' that has been a staple of roundelay romance since Shakespeare and before. It's a crowd-pleaser, then, in the sense that the word describes a film with no surprises, no controversy, a charming location, and a dangerous level of sweetness. Perhaps 'crowd pacifier' is a better term.
Cassandra (Romola Garai) is the 17-year-old and youngest daughter of James (Bill Nighy), a reclusive novelist crippled by writer's block. Her older sister Rose (Rose Byrne) is an odd-duck pining for a better life removed from the crumbling castle to which their father spirited them away following the success of his literary debut. Now crushed beneath two years of unpaid rent and a hippie (though in the 1930s when this film is set, 'hippie' was just 'aggressively insane') stepmother Topaz (Tara Fitzgerald) with a penchant for streaking, the pithily named Cassandra and Rose are introduced to their new landlords: wealthy yanks Simon Cotton (Henry Thomas) and his younger brother Neil (Marc "Riley from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'" Blucas). A series of delightful misunderstandings ensue, with even dotty James getting a little inspiration from Algonquin-tongued Mrs. Cotton (Sinéad Cusack).
Oblique references to the decadence of the dying of the Jazz Age pass with a few artists here and again (and a swarthy working boy (Henry Cavill) turned kept boy and he-starlet) while altogether too much time is given over to an inexplicable 'bear hunt' that humiliates Rose and her newly inherited fur coat. A light film for the most part, with the lion's share of mawkish self-obsession granted to Cassandra and her remarkably faithful (read: irritating and juvenile) journal entry voiceovers, the picture has a nice feeling to it–a paddleboat ride around a charming pond in England perhaps the best analogy, the film is lulling in its way, and sapping, too, for its leisure. There's not much to condemn about the perfectly workmanlike and just as perfectly ordinary I Capture the Castle, though lightly comic moments flit around with vaguely awkward romantic moments, all of it tying up neatly in the sort of anachronistic feminism carried with more elegance and heat by Virginia Woolf or, as it happens, by Austen herself. There are worse ways to spend a hot summer afternoon, but I Capture the Castle is a lot of sweet nothing whose chief selling point is, damning with faint praise, its complete inoffensiveness. Originally published: July 18, 2003.
