Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10735 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-12-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 113 minutes

Amazon.com
When her family moves into a glamorous castle in the English countryside, Cassandra (Romola Garai) imagines great things will happen. But the decaying castle loses its appeal as her novelist father (Bill Nighy, Love Actually) develops writer's block and her mother dies of cancer. From this sad beginning, I Capture the Castle turns into an utterly engaging coming-of-age story as 17-year-old Cassandra and her older sister Rose (Rose Byrne) struggle to win the attentions of their new American landlord (Henry Thomas, E.T. The Extraterrestrial)--but when everything goes the way Cassandra hopes, her hopes fall apart. Garai's wonderful performance carries the audience through bittersweet discoveries about life and adulthood with hope and yearning. The entire cast---also featuring Tara Fitzgerald (Brassed Off) and Marc Blucas--is superb. I Capture the Castle is an absolutely lovely movie, delightful and surprisingly wise. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

not too bad
As a movie alone this was pretty decent. However it pales in comparison to the book. There are a few awkward moments but overall it was fun to watch and I enjoyed it. but please read the book first!

I Capture the Castle
I love Romola Garai. Everything movie she is in is good. She seems to pick perfect scripts with great story lines. This movie really "captures" you and lets you get involved with each person in the film. Great acting!

I suffer the boredom
I Capture the Castle (Tim Fywell, 2003)

I Capture the Castle was adapted from what may be the most awkwardly-titled young adult novel of all time, and TV director Tim Fywell's lack of insistence that the godawful title be changed should tip you off that awkwardness comprises a good deal of what you're in for with this exceptionally odd adaptation. First off, why shut out most of your built-in audience by making an R-rated adaptation of a young adult book? Why make it worse with some of the strangest casting decisions in modern filmdom? Why not at least try to whip it into some sort of shape that readers of the book might recognize? Well, to be fair, it's quite possible they did that; that may, in fact, be the source of all the awkwardness. Let the viewer decide.

Cassandra Mortmain (Atonement bombshell Romola Garai) and her odd family-- older sister Rose (28 Weeks Later's Rose Byrne), father James (Pirates of the Caribbean's Bill Nighy), and stepmother Topaz (Brassed Off's Tara Fitzgerald)-- move to a crumbling castle in the country so James, a previously successful writer with a decade-long case of writer's block, can finally start working again. The problem is, it doesn't work, and a couple of years down the road, the family are penniless. Enter the Cotton family, who own the land on which the castle stands. The two brothers, Neil (They's Marc Blukas) and Simon (Deadbirds' Henry Thomas), capture Rose's eye, and she sets her heart on marrying one of them to pull her family out of poverty. Thus begins a melodrama of manners.

And melodrama it is; nary a chance to overnarrate, overact, overdecorate, or overdirect is passed up. Even at less than two hours and being based on a novel, the film is brutally slow-paced. One wonders what swathes of prose got cut to make this screenplay fit to time, and whether all the book's actual action, plot furtherance, and character development was contained in it. (That's actually not a bad guess, as much of what goes wrong with novel adaptations usually has to do with one or more of those three aspects getting cut; it's a rare thing all three fall by the wayside, however.) The sole bright light in all this is Romola Garai's performance. For all I know, she's overacting in every scene, but relative to what's around her, it at least seems understated and heartfelt. Other than that, though, and Tara Fitzgerald's character's propensity to go dancing naked in the dark, I couldn't find a single reason to keep watching this film, save to spare those of you who've never seen it before the same boredom I suffered. *