Atonement
by Spencer Warren
Issue 101 - February 13, 2008

Atonement is a wonderful, impassioned, often brilliantly directed movie. I consider needlessly giving away plot details a capital offense and instead will try to focus on the talent and imagination that make this film so beautifully realized on screen. It is adapted from the award-winning 2001 novel of the same title, by the acclaimed British author Ian McEwan. Reviewing the novel in Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2001, Geoff Dyer perceptively commented “that it is difficult to give an adequate sense of what is going on in the novel without preempting – and thereby diminishing – the reader’s experience of it.” The same applies to the film, which is meant as high praise for director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton.

Atonement is a love story with a lot more. The best part is what we may call the first of the film’s three acts. It takes place on a hot summer’s day in the gorgeous English countryside in 1935, at the grand country home (i.e. mansion) of the Tallis family. Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is the fanciful but ordered and disciplined (or so she appears) 13-year-old daughter who has precociously just completed her first play, an impetuous, idealistic romance titled The Trials of Arabella. Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is the big sister, a slender, intense (chain smoking), dark-haired beauty – like many English girls of her type, proper on the surface, but seething underneath. Robbie (James McAvoy) is the non-aristocrat outsider, a servant’s son who was able to attend Cambridge with Cecilia thanks to her father’s kind support. The older brother, Leon, is coming with a friend for a simple dinner party, formal, of course (Keira Knightley’s flowing green evening gown, perfect, shall we say, for hot weather, is the epitome of swank thirties style and, seen on her, is alone worth the price of admission).

In the course of the day and evening, Briony observes, by chance, certain encounters between Cecilia and Robbie she should not see and which she does not understand, but which she thinks she does understand. She also commits a very grave sin. All this sets off an avalanche of events that drives the story and the lives of the three protagonists in the course of future years to an affecting climax.

From the first minute of this film, one knows it is special, a trait often found with accomplished directors. One’s attention is immediately riveted by the intense realism of the acting (not least the young Briony); the natural feeling of time and place created by the soft cinematography, period costumes and Cecilia’s short, thirties hair style; the rich, but unobtrusive, production design (lots of chintz); the unusually sophisticated, understated musical score that underlines the story; and the telling concentration and editing of each shot and scene. From the outset, we feel we know each character well. And the young director Joe Wright does this without the tacky close-up, “in your face” pounding manner of direction so typical today; he lets the characters live and breath in real space, allowing the action to develop naturally and subtly, without needless effect, from one scene to the next. And he is one contemporary director who is a master of the visual essence of filmmaking, avoiding endless, static head-to-head dialogue. Indeed, the entire first section of the film is a tribute to Wright’s talent, whose second feature film this is (following Pride and Prejudice in 2005), and to screenwriter Hampton. It is a tour de force of outstanding filmmaking which should be seen in a movie theater, not in the confined space of a DVD.

The second part of Atonement brings us to the Second World War: It is 1940, Hitler’s Panzers are thrusting across France, and Britain soon will be left standing alone. Cecilia and Robbie find themselves engulfed by the turbulent events. They are just where they are in the maelstrom (again, I do not wish to give away anything) because of chance events five years before and because of what Briony did.

The battle sequence is a bit too long and not up to the intense, concentrated level of the film’s first part (plus, as usual, the digital special effects of war look a bit cheesy compared to the painting and other artistic special effects of pre-computer Hollywood at its best). But Wright has a number of lovely shots in London that stay in one’s memory. In one, Cecilia and Robbie briefly, desperately, silently touch hands in a crowded coffee shop. (This scene brings to mind the classic 1946 British romance, Brief Encounter, in which the separately married man (Trevor Howard) and woman (Celia Johnson) are compelled to steal their precious moments together in public places.) In another scene, we see the couple embracing, from a distance, looking up from the road through the window of their second-floor flat. Wright likes to use distance to make the emotion understated, which requires the audience to use its imagination and thus makes the emotional impact more powerful – this was standard in classic movies but is unusual in a director nowadays.

Atonement at times employs an unusual narrative technique involving flash-forwards, an example of non-linear narration found sometimes in modernist and post-modernist literature and film, which allows the author or director to examine the same “reality” from the perspectives of different characters. This technique allows the author or director to take us into the minds of the characters, seeing things from their subjective point of view. In contrast, classic literature and pre-sixties films tend to present one simple “objective” perspective. Further, faithful to the book, the film employs an astonishing plot twist which makes the finale quite simply overpowering.

In short, Atonement culminates in a traditional moral catharsis, although it is one that leaves us with ambiguity. We leave the film asking questions about whether the wrongdoer has atoned for her wrongdoing, what is atonement, whether one can atone through one’s art, and whether we should forgive her. Atonement is a moral film for the new century, and the kind of film that fully deserves to win the Academy Award for best picture, for which it has been nominated (along with six other nominations).

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline.com’s media critic.