It's mostly that it's the type of film that the people from the National Board of Review tend to seoon over. But this group has thrown a few curveballs over the last few years.Steph2 wrote:Are the reviews generally that positive that so many of you are predicting it to do well with the National Board of Review?
Atonement: The Poll
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
A limited release beginning this Friday (12/7).Steph2 wrote:When does the film come out? Are the reviews generally that positive that so many of you are predicting it to do well with the National Board of Review?
It's a combination of generally positive reviews (some of them ecstatic) and the whole aspect of the project--literary, romantic, British, the cast of rising stars, and a rising director--that has it at the top of predictions lists.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Akash wrote:When an older Briony is doing nurse duty during WWII, it's out of penance, which we know only because Cecilia, also a nurse, tells us as much,
Just as she does in the novel in a letter to Robbie.
And isn't the "vainglorious prologue" actually an epilogue?
Edited By flipp525 on 1196814275
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Ed Gonzalez doesn't care for it. His objections are all the things I feared when I heard they were making this lovely novel into a film.
Slant Magazine
Atonement
by Ed Gonzalez
Posted: November 16, 2007
The acclaim Joe Wright's Atonement has garnered prior to its release illustrates how Oscar hype impacts the review process. Released any other time of the year, the film may have been seen for what it is: a luxe adaptation of a modern literary classic. But it comes to us at the end of the calendar year, when publicists and pundits conspire to groom films, typically sight unseen, for the award-season horse races, so Atonement is accepted as a masterpiece by audiences almost without question. The film's gullible, largely histrionic plaudits speak of something so awesome, sensual, and intelligent you half expect to see the second coming of Gosford Park, when it's not even Howards End.
Ian McEwan's characters all seem to suffer from the same disorder of the mind, as if they "lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception"—a quote from the author's stunning Enduring Love, traduced by Roger Michell into a queer version of Fatal Attraction a few years back. Atonement's Briony, a precocious little fabulist whose naïvete ruins many lives, is like scientific journalist Joe Rose from Enduring Love and the grieving Vernon and Clive from Amsterdam—people who inhabit a world where logic is "the engine of feeling." These characters inherit the author's obsession with time and memory—an intellectual disease, for sure, but one that always feels vibrantly and affectingly diagnosed and suffered. They're all self-absorbed people, but Briony's temperament is partly justified by her youth, which makes Atonement especially poignant.
The 13-year-old Briony words indicate she is wise beyond her years, but she is still not versed in matters of sex. Wright understands this discrepancy between conduct and understanding, but he has dubious fun charting the succession of events that confuse Briony (Saoirse Ronan) into falsely accusing Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), son of the family maid, of raping her older cousin. She intuits something perverse in her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) diving into the fountain in front of the house while a nervous Robbie watches, then links this confounding moment to a naughty word she catches a glimpse of in the letter Robbie asks her to give to Cecilia, and later to Robbie straddling Cecilia in the library, and finally, to a mysterious man forcing himself on Lola (Juno Temple). The pulse quickens, but Wright politely dances around the moral tragedy of Briony's lie.
Wright, who earned specious comparisons to Altman with his overpraised Pride & Prejudice, overlooks the class divisions that haunt the nooks and crannies of McEwan's novel. The closest acknowledgement of such friction is Cecilia's line about how she and Robbie move "in different circles" and the admonishing look the girl directs at a servant for not knowing where to put a visitor's luggage. As such, audiences hardly sympathize with the way Briony's false accusation cuts to the core of Robbie's being, obliterating his chance at a prosperous future that once seemed possible after he and his mother (Brenda Blethyn) fell into the good graces of Briony and Cecilia's bourgeois family. Even during an excellent but ill-placed flashback late in the film, in which Briony pretends to drown, one is struck by how easily adults forget that, in spite of her sagacity, she is still a child, but Wright's impatient style insufficiently grapples with the way Briony's confusion and isolation in the wake of her great lie makes her a castaway from the world.
McEwan's uncanny expression of the intangible has posed a challenge to those who've brought his novels and short stories to the screen (it's why fans of the author consider his work "unfilmable"), and Wright resorts to obvious cinematic shorthand to communicate Atonement's metaphysical ideas. Wright is no Raul Ruiz, and the only way he cares to evoke Robbie's sense of regret and lost time is by playing the scenes surrounding his arrest backward. And though the audience already knows the contents of the letter Robbie asks Briony to give to her sister, "the worst word in the world" flashes again on the screen when Briony takes a peek at the letter, the clickety-clank of a typewriter filling the soundtrack, influencing the rhythm of the editing—fuddy duddies will feel flustered—and reminding us that Briony is a girl who does a lot of writing. This is how Wright frequently hand-holds his audience, literalizing the novel's mysteries.
Altman overlapped dialogue to convey naturalness, but Wright's similar approach feels artificial, emphasizing his uncertainty as an artist, as in Briony writing on the family grounds and her voice inexplicably filling the soundtrack multiple times. Wright is also prone to unnaturally propping his actors across the frame, as in the scene where Briony and her party guests appear to stand on an invisible geometric grid as they await Robbie's return from a reconnaissance mission in the woods, and the overemphatic score by Dario Marianelli matches his anxiety. If Wright's tasteful symmetry were isolated entirely to the film's first half, Atonement might have been onto something about a culture's titanic shift from an ancient, almost holy way of living toward a new modern age, but even the film's post-war sequences are framed in the same fastidious style. The film is pretty but without spontaneity, not unlike a Calvin Klein fashion show—almost eager to be done with and for which Knightley always feels to be auditioning for, even when wet. It's as if Wright were simply buying time until his virtuostic Dunkirk sequence—a four-minute-plus long take that is a triumph of extras casting and production design but completely devoid of emotion.
"Basically, I just like showing off." That's how Wright explained the Dunkirk sequence to a festival audience. So does Emir Kusturica, but he's able to break the heart in addition to wowing the eyes, as in the phantasmagoric finale of Underground, in which the personal is fiercely connected to the political and the horrors of war feel as if they are the fallout of familial betrayal. Wright's war scenes are failures of imagination because the filmmaker doesn't suggest a significant connection between the old and new, or the chaos of battle and the horror of what Briony did to Robbie. Like much of the film, which isn't much of a love story, it's all a load of empty posturing.
When an older Briony is doing nurse duty during WWII, it's out of penance, which we know only because Cecilia, also a nurse, tells us as much, but also because Briony cleans bedpans and scrubs box springs while narrating an apologetic letter to her sister on the soundtrack. These clinical artistic associations are scarcely electric and are typical of the film's cold engine of feeling, and except for McAvoy and Vanessa Redgrave, whose eyes save the vainglorious prologue, the performances are never haunted, though Knightley's affectedness, it must be said, is consistent with Wright's exaggerated idea of upper-class stiffness. The film is such that characters look into the camera and walk through scenes in zombified approximations of suffering and atonement. There's even a scene where Briony says, "It's complicated," about the story she's writing that will one day be known as Atonement. But just because you tell the audience doesn't make it so.
http://slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3327
Slant Magazine
Atonement
by Ed Gonzalez
Posted: November 16, 2007
The acclaim Joe Wright's Atonement has garnered prior to its release illustrates how Oscar hype impacts the review process. Released any other time of the year, the film may have been seen for what it is: a luxe adaptation of a modern literary classic. But it comes to us at the end of the calendar year, when publicists and pundits conspire to groom films, typically sight unseen, for the award-season horse races, so Atonement is accepted as a masterpiece by audiences almost without question. The film's gullible, largely histrionic plaudits speak of something so awesome, sensual, and intelligent you half expect to see the second coming of Gosford Park, when it's not even Howards End.
Ian McEwan's characters all seem to suffer from the same disorder of the mind, as if they "lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception"—a quote from the author's stunning Enduring Love, traduced by Roger Michell into a queer version of Fatal Attraction a few years back. Atonement's Briony, a precocious little fabulist whose naïvete ruins many lives, is like scientific journalist Joe Rose from Enduring Love and the grieving Vernon and Clive from Amsterdam—people who inhabit a world where logic is "the engine of feeling." These characters inherit the author's obsession with time and memory—an intellectual disease, for sure, but one that always feels vibrantly and affectingly diagnosed and suffered. They're all self-absorbed people, but Briony's temperament is partly justified by her youth, which makes Atonement especially poignant.
The 13-year-old Briony words indicate she is wise beyond her years, but she is still not versed in matters of sex. Wright understands this discrepancy between conduct and understanding, but he has dubious fun charting the succession of events that confuse Briony (Saoirse Ronan) into falsely accusing Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), son of the family maid, of raping her older cousin. She intuits something perverse in her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) diving into the fountain in front of the house while a nervous Robbie watches, then links this confounding moment to a naughty word she catches a glimpse of in the letter Robbie asks her to give to Cecilia, and later to Robbie straddling Cecilia in the library, and finally, to a mysterious man forcing himself on Lola (Juno Temple). The pulse quickens, but Wright politely dances around the moral tragedy of Briony's lie.
Wright, who earned specious comparisons to Altman with his overpraised Pride & Prejudice, overlooks the class divisions that haunt the nooks and crannies of McEwan's novel. The closest acknowledgement of such friction is Cecilia's line about how she and Robbie move "in different circles" and the admonishing look the girl directs at a servant for not knowing where to put a visitor's luggage. As such, audiences hardly sympathize with the way Briony's false accusation cuts to the core of Robbie's being, obliterating his chance at a prosperous future that once seemed possible after he and his mother (Brenda Blethyn) fell into the good graces of Briony and Cecilia's bourgeois family. Even during an excellent but ill-placed flashback late in the film, in which Briony pretends to drown, one is struck by how easily adults forget that, in spite of her sagacity, she is still a child, but Wright's impatient style insufficiently grapples with the way Briony's confusion and isolation in the wake of her great lie makes her a castaway from the world.
McEwan's uncanny expression of the intangible has posed a challenge to those who've brought his novels and short stories to the screen (it's why fans of the author consider his work "unfilmable"), and Wright resorts to obvious cinematic shorthand to communicate Atonement's metaphysical ideas. Wright is no Raul Ruiz, and the only way he cares to evoke Robbie's sense of regret and lost time is by playing the scenes surrounding his arrest backward. And though the audience already knows the contents of the letter Robbie asks Briony to give to her sister, "the worst word in the world" flashes again on the screen when Briony takes a peek at the letter, the clickety-clank of a typewriter filling the soundtrack, influencing the rhythm of the editing—fuddy duddies will feel flustered—and reminding us that Briony is a girl who does a lot of writing. This is how Wright frequently hand-holds his audience, literalizing the novel's mysteries.
Altman overlapped dialogue to convey naturalness, but Wright's similar approach feels artificial, emphasizing his uncertainty as an artist, as in Briony writing on the family grounds and her voice inexplicably filling the soundtrack multiple times. Wright is also prone to unnaturally propping his actors across the frame, as in the scene where Briony and her party guests appear to stand on an invisible geometric grid as they await Robbie's return from a reconnaissance mission in the woods, and the overemphatic score by Dario Marianelli matches his anxiety. If Wright's tasteful symmetry were isolated entirely to the film's first half, Atonement might have been onto something about a culture's titanic shift from an ancient, almost holy way of living toward a new modern age, but even the film's post-war sequences are framed in the same fastidious style. The film is pretty but without spontaneity, not unlike a Calvin Klein fashion show—almost eager to be done with and for which Knightley always feels to be auditioning for, even when wet. It's as if Wright were simply buying time until his virtuostic Dunkirk sequence—a four-minute-plus long take that is a triumph of extras casting and production design but completely devoid of emotion.
"Basically, I just like showing off." That's how Wright explained the Dunkirk sequence to a festival audience. So does Emir Kusturica, but he's able to break the heart in addition to wowing the eyes, as in the phantasmagoric finale of Underground, in which the personal is fiercely connected to the political and the horrors of war feel as if they are the fallout of familial betrayal. Wright's war scenes are failures of imagination because the filmmaker doesn't suggest a significant connection between the old and new, or the chaos of battle and the horror of what Briony did to Robbie. Like much of the film, which isn't much of a love story, it's all a load of empty posturing.
When an older Briony is doing nurse duty during WWII, it's out of penance, which we know only because Cecilia, also a nurse, tells us as much, but also because Briony cleans bedpans and scrubs box springs while narrating an apologetic letter to her sister on the soundtrack. These clinical artistic associations are scarcely electric and are typical of the film's cold engine of feeling, and except for McAvoy and Vanessa Redgrave, whose eyes save the vainglorious prologue, the performances are never haunted, though Knightley's affectedness, it must be said, is consistent with Wright's exaggerated idea of upper-class stiffness. The film is such that characters look into the camera and walk through scenes in zombified approximations of suffering and atonement. There's even a scene where Briony says, "It's complicated," about the story she's writing that will one day be known as Atonement. But just because you tell the audience doesn't make it so.
http://slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3327
I'm re-reading the novel right now and one of the things that's struck me the second time around is the way that McEwan uses seering imagery to reinforce the horror/inevitability of the situation around the characters without the "look, this is a symbol of the horrors of war!" or "Lola's fate is similar to Arabella, the character she was supposed to play!" reductive literary crutches. The perfectly amputated leg in the tree that Robbie encounters in the Dunkirk section, for example, is so aptly placed, it's almost a secret that only he and the readers have been let in on.
And, on a purely logistical point, (and keep in mind that I'm halfway through at the moment and it's been awhile so I could be forgetting certain pieces towards the end) hadn't Lola already been man-handled by Paul Marshall even before the search party set out to look for the twins? It seems like McEwan made a special point to have the characters observe that the bruises on her arms couldn't possibly have been made by two small boys. And Marshall had that conspicuous cut on his face during dinner. In that case, wouldn't Lola have been more apt to conclude that it was Marshall who'd raped her when Briony confronted her near the stone edifice? Or, was she so shaken up, that Briony's suggestion instantly became a foregone conclusion?
That first section is so powerful and intense, it almost dwarves the rest of the novel.
Edited By flipp525 on 1196803821
And, on a purely logistical point, (and keep in mind that I'm halfway through at the moment and it's been awhile so I could be forgetting certain pieces towards the end) hadn't Lola already been man-handled by Paul Marshall even before the search party set out to look for the twins? It seems like McEwan made a special point to have the characters observe that the bruises on her arms couldn't possibly have been made by two small boys. And Marshall had that conspicuous cut on his face during dinner. In that case, wouldn't Lola have been more apt to conclude that it was Marshall who'd raped her when Briony confronted her near the stone edifice? Or, was she so shaken up, that Briony's suggestion instantly became a foregone conclusion?
That first section is so powerful and intense, it almost dwarves the rest of the novel.
Edited By flipp525 on 1196803821
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
So did I, but it also elevated the novel for me. So what f it wasn't "real?" It works the way memory does -- we don't always remember things exactly as they happened, but often we include things we'd like to have happened. It's the one beautiful thing that can never be taken away from us as human beings living in a shitty reality (or a capitalist nightmare) -- our ability to dream, remake and unmake the world. It's McEwan at his best, asserting that desire and art are as substantial as any experience that actually happened.
Edited By Akash on 1196800647
Edited By Akash on 1196800647
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FilmFan720
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It also elevated the novel for me, but it didn't bowl me over. In fact, it didn't even much surprise me. I think that the novel had been so well written, that I was coming to expect more bending of the truth. After all, Briony is a fairly unreliable narrator. Maybe twist just isn't the right word for it, as I think it is too good a piece of art to have a "twist." B Movies have twists.
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I was pretty shocked by it, as well -- and heartbroken, too.The Original BJ wrote:Intriguing. My eyes nearly fell from their sockets when I read that "interesting piece of information."
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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