My DVD has no captions/subtitles

I had been looking forward to watching this film for some time. Started to watch last night and gave up after a few minutes as I could not understand half the dialog. It looks too good to miss so I will try again in the daytime when I can turn the volume right up without disturbing my neighbours' sleep.

I was born and lived most of my long life near London. My accent is Estuary English, very similar to that of Turner's housekeeper and not much different from his. My hearing is not 100%. I find captions helpful with many American (and Scottish) movies, but I cannot remember having trouble hearing a movie with English actors before.

It is very rare these days for a major production on DVD to lack captions. There is plenty of other stuff on the DVD, so why no captions?

My question is, if I could not make out what they were saying, what hope have Americans and those for whom English is a second language? I wonder how many others shared my difficulties?

UPDATE:
I watched the whole film today. The soundtrack was poor and I missed lots of dialog. Part of that is definitely down to mumbling actors but most to technical deficiencies. I do not know if they exist in the original movie or only in the DVD (or maybe only in my copy of the DVD).