ATONEMENT

by Kevin Koehler

Here's where I warn you that the ending of Atonement will be discussed at some point in this critique.  I don't make it a rule to reveal endings, but I will this time, partly because it's central to the meaning of the picture but mostly because it is so awful.  Being the charitable sort, I'll try not to go into such detail that it precludes any enjoyment of the picture that comes before those final, crippling scenes.  Atonement accomplishes this feat quite well all by itself.

Full disclosure: Some months back, I tried reading Ian McEwan's celebrated novel, the one from which this film is adapted, and could only endure forty plodding, over-written pages until self-preservation obliged me to put it down.  Atonement the book has won innumerable plaudits, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, which is kind of a big deal.  Time magazine also called it one of the 100 greatest English-language novels written since 1923.  This is to say, people who should know about books think it is a good one.  Then again, people who should know about films think the adaptation is good, too.  Either it's the subjectivity of artistic expression, the sequaciousness of modern cinema/literary criticism, or I'm simply a philistine with unrefined tastes.  Take your pick.

Like the book, Atonement the motion picture is comprised of four parts of - speaking only of the film, here - descending effectiveness.  Things get off to a compelling start, documenting the events of one fateful day in England, 1935, where a 13-year-old girl by the name of Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) fucks up things royally for her older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and her sister's lover Robby (James McAvoy), one of the workers at their expansive, Surrey Hills estate.  Briony is a budding dramatist, a creator of worlds with herself at the center, the protagonist of her own plays.  As she thoughtfully describes it, her new work, The Trials of Arabella, is "about how love is all very well, but you have to be sensible."  Spoken like a true, passive-aggressive artiste who is too young to have truly experienced love and possesses strong feelings of ressentiment for those that have - the inconsiderate masses who wantonly engage in it without much thought for the feelings of others.

Cecilia and Robby love each other.  Yet through a series of confused, coincidental events (probably too coincidental, but forgivable...for now) involving a broken vase, some hot sex in the library, and the unfortunate use of the c-word, Briony comes to see her sister's beloved as a sex maniac.  When a crime occurs on the estate (whose final moments Briony happens upon, veiled in darkness and shadow), committed by, as luck would have it, an unseen sex maniac, Briony conforms her cloudy perceptions into cold, hard absolutes.  "I know who it was.  I saw him.  I know it was him."  Faced with the insurmountable evidence of Briony's eyewitness testimony and the ruinous c-word, it's time for Robby to go away for awhile, specifically to the big house, where they don't take kindly to sex maniacs who look like handsome young actors.

This is when the film jumps forward four years to World War II, and also when it goes decidedly downhill.  The three major players are all atoning for the real or perceived crimes of that ill-faded day in the country.  Robby is cannon fodder in the British army, having achieved an early release from prison when Her Majesty came looking for warm bodies.  Cecilia is a Nightingale nurse, attending to wounded and hungry men.  Briony, well, she's a nurse as well (new actress: Romola Garai), consumed with guilt over what she did to her sister and Robby but unwilling, at least verbally, to acknowledge that her culpability extends past the pardonable confusion of a well-meaning young girl who could not tell the difference between Robby and a dark shape, titillation and sexual assault, the c-word said as abuse or with love.

Unfortunately, director Wright (who showed great maturity on his previous picture, Pride and Prejudice) loses his hold on the characters and human drama, seeming more interested in cannibalizing his P&P Assembly tracking shot to observe the evacuation of Dunkirk.  It's troublingly free of pathos, a staged, hollow visual (much like a scene of dead schoolgirls lying in a forest that comes moments earlier) that serves little purpose other than to demonstrate Wright's ability to incorporate green screen and other special effects into his signature camera movement.  Briony is remarkable for how unimpressive she is positioned so central to the larger narrative, how little empathy she actually provides while baptizing herself in the blood of wounded soldiers to cleanse her own original sin.  I imagine her problems are supposed to seem petty in comparison to, say, getting part of your head blown off by mortar fire; perhaps this is the point.  But still, it's not such a great point, and does little to appease the boredom that sets in during the film's middle chapters.

Here's where we come to the ending, taking a great chronological leap once again; Briony Tallis (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) is a famous novelist dying of vascular dementia, a condition the character helpfully describes to the audience in detail lest people not know what it is.  She gives an interview talking about her new book (coincidentally called Atonement), a book that includes many of the scenes we'd just seen.  Scenes that the author invented, fabricated from her own remorseful imagination.  Scenes which the character helpfully describes in detail lest the audience not know exactly which ones.  In case we do not get it.  It seems tragedy befell Cecilia and Robby before amends could be made; indeed, before their Great Love could be restored.  Even as I never made it there, I have little doubt that this all worked a lot better in the book.

One pictures a film, a better film, that focused more on those two star-crossed lovers: Why they fell in love, why they stayed in love, what was lost when a little girl came along and read letters addressed to someone else.  Instead, what we have is a boilerplate Upstairs, Downstairs forbidden romance treated as the end-all-be-all of human existence, played against the constant drone of typewriter keys (admittedly an interesting score conceit, but still), and the self-hating writer who describes it all, someone who seems to think the creative process is at best self-serving, the refuge of cowards, at worst a complete and utter lie.  Words can kill, damn it, especially if that word is the c-word.  To which I say, so fucking what?

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