I Capture the Castle movie review (2003)

As the movie opens, the Mortmain family on a country outing finds a castle--small and run-down, it is true, but undeniably a castle--and the father, James, stands on the battlements and declares, "I will write masterpieces here!" He is given to such pronouncements, often followed by a sideways glance to see if anyone believes him. He did write one well-regarded book, it is true, but now he descends into a long barren period, and in 1936, when the story takes place, the Mortmains are behind on the rent, short on food money and increasingly desperate.

The Mortmains are: James (Bill Nighy), the father who seems to be going around the bend; his wife, Topaz (Tara Fitzgerald), a long-tressed artist; younger sister Cassandra (Romola Garai), who is the narrator, and the official family beauty, Rose (Rose Byrne), who is so impatient with poverty that at one point she runs out into the rain and announces she plans to sell herself on the streets and will borrow the train fare to the city from the vicar.

The girls' mother died some years earlier, and Topaz does her best with two ungrateful girls and a husband who seems on the edge of madness. Then one day all changes when two young Americans arrive in the district. They are Simon and Neil Cotton (Henry Thomas and Marc Blucas), the sons and heirs of the owner of the property, and rather than collect the back due rent, they proceed to fall in love with Rose--Simon obviously, Neil quietly. Their British mother (Sinead Cusack) is both appalled and amused by the family, and invites them over to dinner, an event that has to be seen to be believed.

"Why are you all dressed in green?" the brothers ask on their first meeting with this family. It has to do with a surfeit of dye, and too much time on their hands. The family is educated, literate, creative, but alarmingly unworldly; what the brothers take for artful naivete is artless lack of sophistication. Rose however knows that she will marry anyone to get out of the leaky, drafty castle, and that leads to a complicated romantic melodrama which also involves Cassandra and Neil's secret feelings, not necessarily for each other.

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