Atonement (2007)
NETFLIX SYNOPSIS: In this drama based on the critically acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan, a childhood lie irrevocably changes the lives of several people forever. When 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) misinterprets a moment of flirtation between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and a servant’s son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), her confusion causes her to finger Robbie as the perpetrator of a crime. Brenda Blethyn and Vanessa Redgrave co-star.
REVIEW: Brillant book, not quite a brilliant film. Definitely has the Miramax/Minghella look that Golden Globe and Oscar voters love, but still I don’t know that it’s worthy of all that love. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy certainly look scrumptious but no chemistry whatsoever. This book has one of the greatest sex scenes ever written, but on screen, frankly, you just keep thinking that Keira needs to eat a bit more at lunch. She is so skeletal it detracts in a big way. Still, she tries hard and you do feel for her character. McAvoy shows that his performance in The Last King of Scotland was no fluke – he’s sexy, brave and tragic, all you need from a romantic hero. Saorise Ronan is another great performer in this and she brings to life Briony as the obnoxious, drama-filled 13-year-old troublemaker from the novel.
The beginning is superb, moves well, nice erotic tension and then BAM! it just stops like it got hit by a freight train. The war scenes are certainly great visuals, including the long tracking shot on the beach at Dunkirk, but someone needed to bring Joe Wright aside and explain the aesthetics of story and editing to the director. Regardless, it’s a nice-looking film and it’s a decent adaptation, but the suckerpunch ending loses some of its power, and Briony comes off a bit more contrite and sympathetic than Ian McEwan describes her in the book.
3.5 stars
Cheryl
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***SPOILERS***
Set in 1932, the first act of Atonement opens in the room of 13-yr-old Briony Tallis w/a shot of a model of the Tallis home, then the camera tracks down and along the floor, following a procession of small toy animals that the girl has meticulously arranged in a parade, from largest to smallest, appearing to march towards Briony, whom we first see from behind and below, at her desk typing furiously away on a play. This opening shot gives Briony a kind of God-like presence in her own world, where she governs her toys and the characters in her stories and plays; later, when she and her cousins rehearse the play, Briony is both authoress and director, always in charge. This characterization of Briony as something of a manipulator comes to real-life fruition when, feeling hurt and betrayed, she tells a lie that destroys the lives of two of the people she loves most, her sister Cecilia and Robbie, the son of their housekeeper. That terrible lie, how it comes about and its consequences, is the centerpiece of the film and the theme of “atonement” that revolves around it.
Briony believes herself to be in love w/Robbie. There is an amazing, shocking shot when Briony walks in on Cecilia and Robbie having sex in the library, w/Cecilia up against the wall and Robbie standing in front of her. We see it from Briony’s pov and Cecilia appears to be impaled upon the wall in a Christ-on-the-cross-like pose – to the younger girl it appears an act of violence. This foreshadows and mirrors a later scene when Briony once again happens upon a couple in the act of sex and interprets it as rape. But this time it’s Lola and Paul, her cousin and a visiting friend. Caught in a shameful act, Lola goes along w/the rape charge by an unknown assailant and Briony, seeing an opportunity for revenge, asserts that she saw it was Robbie. There are multiple ironies in this scene, as both girls know it was Paul, but neither knows the other is lying; Lola is also lying about it being rape (and perhaps somewhere in her heart, Briony also know this?), while we in the audience know the truth of all that has actually occurred. Robbie is arrested and put in prison, and later he agrees to join up and fight in the war.
The second act follows Robbie in the war, who is wounded and trying to get home to Cecilia, and the two sisters, now estranged of course, who are both nurses in the aid of the war-wounded. Briony is full of remorse for her act and tries to contact her sister, who refuse to see her. During this sequence there is a deeply moving scene as Briony tries to comfort a wounded soldier; delirious, he talks to her as if she is his lover and Briony, this time in an act of kindness, plays along. When the soldier asks her to loosen the bandage around his head, she unwraps the gauze to reveal an horrific head-wound that surely must be fatal. Even with the best of intentions, Briony’s play-acting is fruitless and he dies, leaving her alone w/her futile fiction.
The final act of the film consists mostly of one long, extraordinary scene of attempted reconciliation, as Briony visits Cecilia and Robbie in their flat, together at last, as she attempts to apologize and set things right between them all. The brilliance of this scene only comes to light in the perspective of the last few minutes of the film, when a very old and dying Briony reveals what actually happened in the story. Even though I’ve put a spoiler warning for those who haven’t yet seen the film, I won’t reveal what occurs, because I think it’s one of the most shocking and profound “twists” that I’ve ever seen in a movie and should be experienced first-hand. I’ve read that some people hate the ending, but that is to miss the whole point of the film. W/o that ending it’s still a wonderful movie, but w/the incredible irony of that denouement I think it fully realizes its profound, heartbreaking themes. For Briony there is not, nor can there ever be, any kind of real atonement.
5 Stars
Harold
