Love to the manor reborn

“I Capture the Castle” is a singular experience. It’s a rich, emotional story, a wonderfully appealing film made with humor and intelligence, but there is also something almost magical about how it takes the stuff of innumerable previous films -- love, romance and adolescent coming of age -- and turns them into something that feels one of a kind.

Much of that singularity comes from its celebrated source material, Dodie Smith’s debut novel, published in 1948 but set a decade earlier. The British Smith was already a successful playwright then living in the U.S. and was to become much better known in the future for writing children’s books like “The Hundred and One Dalmatians.” But it is this romance, the kind of book that gets passed hand to hand, that has inspired the most lasting fervor among readers.

That’s because of the irresistible spirit of its narrator, fresh and sensible 17-year-old Cassandra (newcomer Romola Garai), introduced sitting in the kitchen sink of the collapsing English castle that is her home and writing in the journals that form the novel.

Cassandra’s in the sink because that provides the best vantage point from which to view her family of thoroughgoing eccentrics, later described by someone trying gamely to be polite as “a highly individual bunch of individuals.”

The core members include her father, Mortmain (Bill Nighy), a troubled genius of a blocked writer who produced a masterpiece once upon a time but hasn’t written for years. His artistic second wife, Topaz (Tara Fitzgerald), wants to be his muse, but her creativity gets sidetracked into things like dyeing all the family’s clothing green.

Most troubled by all of this is Cassandra’s 20-year-old sister, Rose (Rose Byrne), a pre-Raphaelite beauty with flowing red hair and a theatrical temperament to match. She longs for some romance in her life, but Cassandra doesn’t. “I’ll never fall in love,” she says confidently. “Life is dangerous enough.”

This family’s truly bleak and penniless state gets an unexpected shaking-up when two handsome American brothers arrive on the scene. Serious, goateed Simon (Henry Thomas) has just inherited the Suffolk property on which the family’s rented castle sits, and his brash brother Neil (Marc Blucas) is an orange grower from far-off California.

Initially the brothers are not taken with the sisters or their castle. When Simon says it’s like something out of a storybook, Neil snaps back, “Yeah, the House of Usher.”

But proximity breeds interest, and when the young men’s mother, Mrs. Cotton (Sinead Cusack), arrives and starts to pay attention to Cassandra and Rose’s father, complications are inevitable.

As the sisters scheme to get Simon to fall in love with Rose and save the family from penury, “Castle” artfully develops its theme of the vagaries of human attraction, the unfairness of who falls in love with whom, and the unsettling, absolutely deranging power of love.

Also strong is the film’s fine portrayal of typically volatile adolescent emotions. There’s no avoiding empathizing with Cassandra and Rose, both laughing with them and fearing for them as they grapple fearlessly with the highs and lows of young love, coping with what the self-aware Cassandra exactly characterizes by saying, “The thing we knew least about was being women.”

Making all this happen are actors not enormously well-known to American audiences and filmmakers whose considerable careers have largely been spent in British television. “Castle” is screenwriter Heidi Thomas’ first theatrical script though she’s been writing professionally since 1984, and director Tim Fywell also makes his feature debut after BBC productions like “Madame Bovary” and “Woman in White.”

What they’ve all combined to accomplish here is a romantic fantasy tempered by reality and genuine emotion. Neither conventionally told nor resolved, and able to make the most eccentric situations believable, “I Capture the Castle” is both an ordinary story and a special one -- and that, finally, is the secret of its success.

*

‘I Capture the Castle’

MPAA rating: R

Times guidelines: Some nudity, language, mature themes but otherwise suitable for older teens.

Henry Thomas...Simon

Marc Blucas...Neil

Rose Byrne...Rose

Romola Garai...Cassandra

Bill Nighy...Mortmain

Tara Fitzgerald...Topaz

Henry Cavill...Stephen

A Trademark Films/BBC Films production, released by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Director Tim Fywell. Producer David Parfitt. Executive producers Mike Newell, Mark Shivas, Steve Christian, Keith Evans. Screenplay Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith. Cinematographer Richard Greatrex. Editor Roy Sharman. Costumes Charlotte Walter. Music Dario Marianelli. Production design John-Paul Kelly. Art directors Leigh Walker, Mike Stallion. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

In limited release.