I enjoyed this. I knew the title, but had never really gotten a grip on the story behind it.

Thank you! I knew the general lines of the history going in, but very few of the details; I read Gutch's Caraboo: A Narrative afterward and was generally surprised and pleased at how little the script had to change. Mostly it amplifies figures and events rather than whole-cloth inventing them; its major alterations are the way it ties Gutch into the story from the start, which changes the timeline of information available to the viewer as well as building in a romantic possibility, and then the ways he's written as a character. I don't believe the historical Gutch was Irish, but it plays just fine with the film's themes of colonialism and otherness—he's another outsider to good English society and not the kind that gets taken up and petted by the gentry, either. Even sympathetic Mrs. Worrall makes an unwarranted crack about the journalist's nationality when she feels nettled by him. But he's also the one with a native language up his sleeve.

- which sounds like the prototypical Kevin Kline part!

Fair enough!