Terence Rattigan dramatized the incident in his 1946 play The Winslow Boy, and now Rattigan's play has been adapted for the screen by American playwright/filmmaker David Mamet. Forgoing once again the hypermasculine, profane style that won him acclaim in films like House of Games, writer-director Mamet follows his playful, PG-rated The Spanish Prisoner with this courteous, restrained (and G-rated) British drama. Given Mamet's smarts, one tends to assume that any pattern to be discerned in his work must have meaning. The question is: What interests him in Rattigan's play? And does his fascination translate into new insight for the filmgoer?

Some clues to Mamet's method may be found in the subtle changes he makes in the received text. Rattigan moved the action from 1908 to the very eve of World War I; Mamet retreats to a happy medium, 1910, when rumors of European troubles were just reaching British shores. Nigel Hawthorne plays Arthur Winslow, the father, as a down-to-earth businessman, a bank manager with a decent living to pass along to his children. He's bemused by the younger generation; when his son Dickie (Matthew Pidgeon) defends necking with his girlfriend in the parlor by saying they were practicing a dance called the Bunny Hug, the father replies dryly, "Is that what they're calling it these days?" Yet he barely hesitates before initiating a campaign in the press and the House of Commons to erase the stain against his younger son Ronnie's good name; he is convinced that honor and right are not among the cultural casualties since his own youth.

"Right"--the word is repeated incessantly in Rattigan's text and in Mamet's adaptation. The former gives Ronnie's older sister Catherine (Rebecca Pidgeon) a suffragette's placard, but Mamet suggests that Catherine's fight for women's rights and Arthur Winslow's fight for his son are fundamentally different. Catherine pursues her cause through a bureaucratic organization to which she gives a few hours a week. To her, the vote is a symbol of equality, not a vital crusade. But "right" is not symbolic to her father; it is the object of a personal quest undertaken regardless of the consequences.

The key to The Winslow Boy lies not in what Mamet dramatizes, but in what he doesn't. Rather than supplement Rattigan's staging with images of the uproar in the press or the crowds outside the Winslow home, the filmmaker merely indicates that the case has become a wider phenomenon by showing a few newspaper cartoons. He does not take us into the courtroom, but has a servant deliver the verdict. The public remains offscreen.

To the director, The Winslow Boy is about the private decision to pursue a public remedy--a decision that could have been revoked many times, and nearly is. Tempers do not flare, voices are barely raised, emotions remain under rigorous control throughout. Everything that interests Mamet takes place in the ultimate privacy zone--in the minds of the characters. Much of it is never brought to speech.

And so The Winslow Boy becomes an exercise for Mamet: how to put on a play about something that's not found in the dialogue on the page. The Edwardian reserve of Rattigan's characters is the perfect treadmill for his workout. It's an entertaining exercise, to be sure, full of wonderful details like Rebecca Pidgeon's mannered performance, which Mamet turns into gentle sexual satire. For most moviegoers, it will be a diverting piece of Victoriana. But for David Mamet's fans, it will be another piece set into the incomplete jigsaw puzzle of this fascinating man's obsessions.