I Capture The Castle

Reviewed by LINDA HERRICK

(Herald rating: * * * )

It may seem trivial, but anyone who loves Dodie Smith's 1948 classic novel on which this BBC Films version is based will understand.

Two essential personalities have been lost in the transition to screen - Heloise the bull-terrier and Abelard the cat.

That sounds absurd, but part of the enduring charm of the book is the way teenage diarist Cassandra Mortmain, the "I" of the title, engages with the animals because she is lonely, depressed or more often, just plain pleased to count them, anthropomorphically, as her friends.

In other words, she is an adolescent, albeit living in the late 1930s in a ruined castle in the soggy English countryside with her eccentric, impoverished family.

In the film, Abelard is absent, and Heloise is just any old dog - but it is inevitable that a novel packed with so much detail and nuance would lose something in the translation.

Otherwise, this production, directed by Fywell in his film debut (he has TV's Cracker and North Square credits in his CV) does Smith fair service, even if many of the book's most dramatic and funny moments are diluted.

Here, Cassandra (an excellent performance by Romola Garai, last seen on the small screen as the slutty secretary in Attachments ) wrestles with the heightening awareness that her family is hopeless and so is her future.

Her father James Mortmain (a gloomy phone-in by Bill Nighy), once hailed because he wrote an acclaimed book, rented the castle on the strength of his royalties, which have now dried up, as has his talent.

Cassandra's stunning older sister Rose (Aussie Rose Byrne) is a petulant manipulator who sees marriage - but to whom? - as her career. The girl's stepmother Topaz (a rather tepid Tara Fitzgerald) is a former artist's model who "communes with nature" (dances in the nude) and dyes everyone's clothes green.

These are innocent times, indeed.

Just as Rose is contemplating running off and working on the hedged lanes of Sussex, the arrival of two rich American brothers who are also their landlords changes the balance of everyone's lives.

Mortmain flirts with their mother Mrs Cotton (archly played by Sinead Cusack) and Topaz flounces back to London. Rose turns into a cringe-making coquette, her goal Simon Cotton (amazingly, Henry Thomas, the little boy from ET), while his brother Neil (Marc Blucas) looks on with open disdain.

But love is more complicated than convenient. What started as a tidy arrangement to get Rose and the Mortmains into money is upturned by the intrusion of awkward real emotions.

I Capture the Castle is an oddity in today's film environment. There is no overt violence, although it contains emotional cruelty. There are no explicit sex scenes, but attraction is obviously a key factor. There are no car chases; our heroine prefers a stroll along the village green, followed by a cup of cocoa. But some things never change, among them the struggle between material security and true love.

The film is by no means perfect, especially when compared to its source.

But it does offer mainly strong performances, especially from Garai, and a novel, gentle honesty which refreshes those tired of the bang-crash of the big releases of the year so far. If only Heloise and Abelard had been given their rightful place as well.

Director: Tim Fywell

Running time: 112min

Rating: PG (adult themes)

Screening: Rialto, Bridgeway, Berkeley cinemas