After enchanting the world with his first feature film, a masterful and refreshing adaptation of the Austen literary classic
Pride & Prejudice, the 35-year-old British directorial prodigy Joe Wright again teams up with his star actress Keira Knightley for another accomplished adaptation of a British literary work: Ian McEwan’s
Atonement. Closely following the novel (adapted for the screen by playwright Christopher Hampton),
Atonement is a fully formed pleasure of a film that only really stumbles in its editing and its closing moments, compressing McEwan’s haunting epilogue into too small a sequence to allow especially those unfamiliar with the novel the time to fully absorb its devastating meaning. Like
Pride & Prejudice, this film could prove an awards magnet and do respectable though probably not spectacular business. It opens the Venice Film Festival on August 29.
(Minor spoilers follow.) In the opening sequence set in a children’s room in a splendid mansion in the British countryside circa 1935, the camera pans gently upwards from a trail of animal puppets worthy of Noah’s Ark on the richly carpeted floor to a chair for grownups on which the petite 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) strains herself to reach all the letters on the typewriter on her desk. Accompanied only by the sound of that typewriter and without a word spoken as yet, the director has already established some of the story’s major themes: the importance of writing, the importance of a point of view (in this case the point of view of a child who would like to pretend she is older) and the difficulty for said child to complete the task she has set herself with the means she has chosen, which are made for adults, not children.
Like in Pride & Prejudice, in which for example the dance sequences were completely integrated into the story, Wright again not simply uses period detail to decorate the frame but injects it right into the very fabric of the story, making it an indispensable part of the events that occur rather than an inconvenience that only the art department needs to deal with. This approach even extends to the music, as Dario Marianelli’s lush score playfully incorporates various diegetic sounds, of which the thematically important typewriter is only the most obvious. The work of cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Hours) and production designer Sarah Greenwood (Pride & Prejudice) is as sensuous as in Wright's first film.
In adapting the novel, Hampton stays very close to the original and finds place for an amazing amount of detail without making the whole seem cluttered. He also retains the decidedly British flavour of the language and even some of the dialogues in French. Atonement is really two stories in one and these two-stories-in-one in their turn happen on two different planes (the second plane is squeezed into the film's coda). There is the story of Briony’s older sister Cecilia or Cee (Keira Knightley), who has returned from Cambridge and feels increasingly drawn to Robbie (James McAvoy), the son of one of the numerous maids of the Tallis household (Brenda Blethyn), whose college tuition has been generously paid for by the family. Despite the class differences, Robbie seems to feel the same, and during the stifling midday heat of summer electricity crackles between the two as Cee climbs out of the fountain she jumped into to recover part of a broken vase and Robbie cannot do anything but stare.
There is also the story of Briony herself, who sees the events at the fountain from behind a window in the house, not fully understanding what is going and made even more suspicious by a too-candidly phrased apology note Robbie writes for Cee not much later. When events before and during dinner spin out of control, Briony will have accused Robbie of a crime he did not commit, locking him away behind bars for years until he gets an early leave to serve in France in WWII, where the story picks up again as both 18-year-old Briony (now played by Romola Garai) and Cecilia have become nurses in different hospitals and Robbie makes his way to Dunkirk through war-torn France.
As in the book, the film takes care to present the early events from points-of-view close to
different characters and Wright and his editor Paul Tothill backtrack several times to show a different take on the same events (most notably the events at the fountain and a continuation of Cee and Robbie’s mating dance in the library not much later). In book-form it is easier to juggle two perspectives at the same time, but on film this does not fully work; is it really necessary for a full understanding of all the characters’ positions to show events twice? A flashback that further explains the relationship between Robbie and Briony is also awkward, inserted at a seemingly random moment that gives it undue prominence as an explanation for later events. Certainly Wright could have relied on his talented actresses to show that their characters are more complex than what this scene suggests?
And what fine actresses they are! Knightley is again in top shape, showing that her Oscar nomination for
Pride & Prejudice was no accident, though her character is very different here. She has not a whole lot of material to work with but fills the screen with a magnetic presence (reminiscent of the
Hollywood stars of the 1940s and 1950s) that nevertheless leaves her enough room to simply be the character. Saoirse Ronan is equally impressive as the young Briony, while Romola Garai as the older Briony sustains the difficult mid-section of the film with a restrained force that belies the fight being fought in her conscience (her scene with a dying French-speaking soldier, played by Jérémie Renier in a cameo, however, is strangely mute).
But the real revelation of
Atonement is
James McAvoy (
The Last King of Scotland), whose Robbie is so convincing that it is no wonder that Cee doesn’t care he is not from the same class as she is. His natural charm and utterly honest demeanour are a wonder to behold and are especially noteworthy in the film’s single best scene, in which Robbie and Cee meet again for the first time after his imprisonment, in a noisy canteen somewhere in wartime London. Neither of them speaks much, but the way McAvoy and Knightley play the crude, untold emotions of this long awaited and much dreamt about encounter is simply heartbreaking.
It is this scene, combined with the sequence at the fountain that could make Robbie and Cee one of the major romantic screen couples of the new millennium and that sells their entire romance, their tragedy and everything that follows. Even the film’s rushed handling of the coda-with-a-sting cannot diminish the force of these two lovers and their much-earned right to be together, forever.
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