Atonement

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

***
UK/France

In the sections where director Joe Wright keeps his showboating tendencies in check his adaptation of Ian McEwan's absorbing if overtly mannered WWII meta-morality-tale flows elegantly. But beyond the first third Wright rarely remembers to restrain himself or his unfortunate tendency to squeeze out poignancy and advertise subtext. That, and the central romance comes off lop-sided. McAvoy is adequate but Knightley, looking morbidly skeletal, is too strained by her practiced if admittedly polished elocution to give off much warmth.

Atonement

Guilt is fleeting in most movies. People do something bad and they’re forgiven for it: the end. Character arcs that halt aren’t worth investing in. Even the Three Colours Trilogy said it was alright to say you’re sorry. But in literature people feel bad for longer. The kind of books that win prizes show there are no endings, only events. People in novels can do something bad one day and then return to that moment, re-live it. Movies need to move a story along. That’s why Atonementdoesn’t work. It isn’t that the movie isn’t good; it’s what it wants from us. It wants us to invest in a story that someone else tells to alleviate their guilt. But there’s no forgiveness for the movie audience.

Briony Tallis is the sort of heroine movie producer’s are terrified of. That’s why this movie is being marketed on Keira Knightley (who play’s Briony’s sister – Cecilia). Briony is 13 – plain, high-strung. She is the sort of girl who doesn’t say anything to anyone, but who is always composing her thoughts in her head. One summer in 1935, at a stately home owned by the Tallises, Briony thinks she sees someone being raped, and falsely testifies against her sister’s boyfriend. All the bad things that happen afterwards are (in Briony’s mind) Briony’s fault.

A lot has been written about Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in this movie, but that’s because their story is sell-able where Briony’s is not. They are in the movie, certainly. But they are in it, as characters, because they feature in someone else’s tragedy, and it’s only really through someone else’s eyes that they are seen. That’s why – I think – they won’t hold in people’s minds like Ralph Feinnes and Kristin Scott Thomas in The English Patient, because they aren’t fully realised, nor meant to be. They are what a younger sibling remembers of her sister and her sister’s boyfriend – half-deciphered. We feel their lust for each other (it’s more than understandable), but we don’t know them as more than Doomed Boy and Doomed Girl.

After McAvoy has been accused of rape, he’s sent to prison. After prison, he’s sent to war. The second half of Atonement is centred round the Dunkirk evacuation, when British forces were evacuated from France in 1940. Director Joe Wright stages one of the most bravura tracking shots in recent memory as McAvoy arrives at Dunkirk; the camera weaves between dissolute soldiers in their hundreds, showing the British army come undone. Doubtless there will be accusations that this is a show-off shot, designed to get its director noticed, but it also shows things as McAvoy would see them: everything all-at-once and far-too-big.

There are no battles in Atonement. A movie concerned with nuances of perspective would get lost in the midst of battle. Besides, Briony doesn’t see the war as it is fought. She becomes a nurse, and sees war’s aftermath. She tries to atone for ruining a life by saving lives – when she can’t save lives, she bears witness (asking soldiers to call her by name, instead of Nurse Tallis). The Briony we meet in the middle of Atonement is sad and choked and inward-looking. Her expression reads: I’m sorry. But she cannot heave her heart into her mouth.

Guilt in Atonement is a millstone, but neither Ian McEwan’s novel, nor the movie, suggest that the burden gets lighter with the passage of time. Briony cannot undo what she did; she can only look back on it. Her understanding of her actions will grow, she will see things differently, but the past is set. In a novel this is a story that is rewarding to read, because we can follow Briony’s thoughts and trace our own regrets alongside them. But in a movie, where we are asked to invest in Briony and her sister (and her sister’s boyfriend, and three different actresses as Briony) we lose heart. Movies don’t do well with thinking about events. Movies move, it’s books that dwell.

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ATONEMENT (2007)

BOTTOM LINE: Long-winded and mis-directed period drama which despite its best intentions, great acting and solid ideas, never really comes together to drive its point home.

THE GOOD: Atonement starts off with the titles being literally typed on screen by a typewriter. This plays in to the main theme of the supposedly central character of Briony Tallis who is writing her first play. Through the first act, 13-year old Briony tells an astonishing lie (fuelled by jealously because of an unrealised crush) that their house-keeper's son Robbie (James McAvoy) raped her cousin in the bushes one night when in fact it was the rich friend of her brother. As a result, Robbie is sent away to prison and later to serve in the army during WW2. Robbie and Cecelia (Keira Knightley) were secretly in love and as a result of her sister Briony's actions, Cecelia is split from Robbie, and Robbie is forced to endure a painful life sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Starting from this strong basis, the film covers some very strong themes and ideas about what happened to the relationships and their responsibilities to each other. 'Atonement' also includes some very flashy techniques, including moments where it goes backwards and forwards in time to follow the same moments from the points of view of different characters, different uses of the typewriter (sound, picture etc) as Briony comes to terms with what she did and how she came to write about it, and some spectacular imagery. There's one shot when Robbie is at war; an uncut steadicam shot which lasts for about five minutes which has to be one of the most impressively staged sequences, not to mention complicated ever staged (although 'Snake Eyes' and 'The Player' probably top it). The film also ends in a rather odd and an unexpected way that could very well have made it a unique and brilliant film, basically suggesting that what we've seen has all come out of Briony's typewriter rather than being real. However...

THE BAD: The film is just not served well but its script, and as a result, the direction. The first act, which really should have just been about 10 minutes long is bloated out to 30 minutes and doesn't really sustain that length of time. The next 30 minutes are not much better as we follow Robbie through the WW2 sequences. This is supposed to be a film about Briony's atonement for her sin yet half the film isn't even focused on her! It's quite clearly Briony's story; however, after the first five minutes or so, the story follows Cecelia and Robbie directly, with Robbie's war story taking the film far away from Briony. In fact, Robbie's war story doesn't contain anything except for him pining for his lost love which after a while becomes very tedious. And then it shifts back to Briony in the second half of the film. She is then played by two new actresses and to make sure we don't get confused as an audience, the filmmakers chose to keep her with the same haircut for her entire life. And what does she do to atone for her sins? She writes a book where Cecelia and Robbie have a happy ending. She admits she had no courage to ever face Cecelia again and on top of that both Cecelia and Robbie died before they could get back together again. Knowing all that, this ending is just plain obnoxious, especially as the character of Briony really doesn't show in the end that she's sorry for what she did.

RATING: 6/10

Todd Murphy <br />
http://www.allaboutmovies.net

Last updated: 2010-02-05 09:37:54 by user01

Atonement (2007)

Atonement is based on the novel of the same name by Ian McEwan. With the success of the book, it was no surprise it became a novel. With the adaptation came great rewards for the film as well, gaining a lot of critical praise and being nominated for an Oscar.

But to me, the film doesn't have that draw that the critics think that it has. The film starts off very slow, introducing the audience to the characters piecemeal. We meet Briony (Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave through the years), a young author writing a play for her crush, handsome and good-natured Robbie (James McAvoy). Robbie is smitten with Briony's older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and gives her a letter that is naughtily worded. Turns out that Cecilia feels the same way about Robbie, and they get frisky in the library, but Briony walks in, misunderstands what is happening, and immediately thinks Robbie is a sex fiend. Briony then comes across a rape, which she blames on Robbie without fully knowing it was him, and he is sent off to jail just after he and Cecilia had just hit it off.

From the getgo, I found Atonement slow and hard to get into. Most of the opening scenes have almost glacial pacing and aren't entirely interesting, and at first seem slightly unimportant to the plot. As we work our way towards Briony's accusation, though, things pick up more and the opening scenes become clearer in meaning. The mystery scenes are more entertaining and brought back my interest, and the intensity of this part of the plot is done very well. But that doesn't discount the fact that for the first half hour, Atonement feels stagnant and meandering.

After Robbie is sent to jail, he takes up a post in the Army, fighting in World War II. The audience takes the trip with him as he sees the horror of war and what Briony's false accusation put him through, but again, the movie seems to drop into a lull here. Its depiction of war is brutal and heartwrenching, but its pacing is too slow to provide a strong emotional reaction.

We move on to Briony's point of view as a nurse healing the wounded from the war, and again, the ravaged bodies of the wounded are disturbing and gory, but here the physical and emotional strain of the war is put to greater use than with Robbie's point of view. Briony finally understands how her false accusation affected Robbie and goes back to apologize for it. And then we move on to Briony as an old woman, who has written a book about the all of the events of her past. Here lies the twist of the film - Briony has rewritten all of the parts in the book to give everything a happier ending. She didn't go to see Robbie or Cecilia because they had already died. By writing the book, she was atoning for what she did to their lives.

The film uses an interesting way of uncovering previous scenes by skipping back in time, as if Briony is rewriting the scene or adding it into the book. It reminded me of Memento, and at first was a bit confusing but after a time fit right in with the rest of the movie. One of the things that bothered me was that I had a hunch that the twist at the end of the film might be something about Briony's rewriting skills, and it didn't surprise me much at the end.

As you can see, though, I'm having a hard time really summing up how I felt about the film. To put it simply, the good was good and the bad was pretty bad. A lot of the film was really emotionally gripping, especially Briony's reminscences of Robbie and Cecilia's deaths. But the lengthy parts in between stripped my interest in the film down so much that it detracted from my emotional reaction. The love story is well done for the most part, which is surprising because I mainly find love stories to be corny or overdone. Here, McAvoy and Knightley are realistic, three-dimensional people whose love is conflicted by long distances and the brink of war. But Briony stands out the most; she's annoying as hell, but her character delivers the most interesting parts of the narrative in the lulls in the story.

Atonement is a good story, and I imagine it makes a far better book than film. Here, psychological explorations of the characters aren't realized enough to create a more moving picture, and what we're left with is a mixed bag of sorts, never knowing if the next scene will be great filmmaking or dry, drawn-out cinema.

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Last updated: 2009-08-23 06:40:22 by Ryneb