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I CAPTURE THE CASTLE
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All the really important things can be said in words of one syllable, writes 18-year-old Cassandra (relative unknown Romola Garai) into the last page of her diary as she sits atop her castle turret on the sun-drenched Isle of Man:
I love. I have loved. I will love.
Flush with cash from his 'work of genius' Jacob Wrestling (what might this title signify, children?), her tempestuously tortured writer father James Mortmain (Bill Nighy) bought an isolated castle on a brilliantly sunny day and a gloriously impractical whim. Dissolve to a sodden dank twelve years later, first wife dead, second wife prone to running naked through dark and stormy nights in hopes of release, Dad locked in his necromantic tower scrying stoneware shards for inspiration.
Enter, stage Bentley, two earnest rich young hunky bewildered Americans, Simon (Henry Thomas, continuing his ET penance by way of LEGENDS OF THE FALL out of VALMONT) and brash babe-ropin' giddy-uppin' Neil (Marc Blucas), who just happen to own the castle.
So, take two nubile sisters: Cassandra and Rose (Rose Byrne, whose previous listed credit is a hardly reassuring minor part in STAR WARS: ATTACK OF THE CLONES), older and prettier but flirtatious and shallow. 2 girls x 3 buff guys (Simon, Neil, and pick-ax-wielding mute yearning Stephen) = 6 he-loves-me-loves-me-not possibilities, and within its 111 minutes the film roundelays five of them, complete with father's-emotional-breakthrough-to-return-to-writing-and-stepmother's-love, before coming to its epitaphic conclusion with Cassie atop her Rumpelstiltskin tower, cursively penciling the zoom-out voiceover.
Despite a serviceable performance from Tara FitzGerald (SIRENS, BRASSED OFF) as stepmother [not wicked] Topaz, and a marvelous Yankee rich bitch from Sinead Cusack (confirming every European stereotype of Americans as boors with wallets), all the really important things about this movie can be said in words of one syllable:
I am bored. I was way bored. I could not have been more bored.