David Mamet's mild adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1946 play about the media and legal hoohah caused by the unwarranted expulsion of English schoolboy Dickie Winslow for theft is as steady and uncompelling as the Winslow family's pursuit of justice. Nigel Hawthorne is quite good as the boy's father, and Jeremy Northam is fine as supersolicitor Sir Robert Morton. What keeps the movie from resting comfortably among its desired peers in accomplished high-toned Merchant and Ivoryesque costume drama land is Rebecca Pidgeon's fembotic turn in the key role as Dickie's older sister Catherine Winslow, whose interaction with family members, the lawyer Morton and her other suitors focuses the story. Pidgeon's effort ranges from understated to bloodless, her British accent is unfortunate, and her performance generally seems to be lifted out of one of Mamet's more pointedly stagy and surreal fictional universes, such as that of Oleanna, for instance, out of place among the more three-dimensional contributions of the rest of the cast.