John Lynch and Maggie Smith are excellent, as ever, but it's the kids who have to carry the movie, and they are definitely up to the task. They are all very, very good, but Mary just blew me away.

Oh, wonderful. I will try to find it.

Well, any frame story with an end game of not!cousins Colin/Mary in a romantic clinch and Dickon dead off-screen doesn't help.

That answers the question steepholm asked me below. I didn't remember Colin and Mary not being cousins, but I don't automatically think of cousin marriage as incest, so the relevance might have passed me by; I remembered that Dickon died. The thing is that from our point in history, WWI would always have been waiting for these characters even if Burnett didn't know it, so I understand that any future fic has to take it into account, but I also object to any forecast that resolves them from three inseparable friends into a dyad and a fridge. I think of them as an emotional OT3 if not necessarily a romantic one and I don't want any components dropping out.

This is reminding me of how much the musical of The Secret Garden annoyed me with "Lily's Eyes," because the whole point was that Colin has his mother's eyes—agate-grey and fringed round with black lashes, looking gaily out of her portrait as his look unhappily out of his face and his father can't bear to meet them. Change that and you change the whole dynamic between them.