Atonement: The Poll

[FilmFan720]

But both Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine have also done it.

[flipp525]

A little bit of Oscar trivia: If Vanessa Redgrave is nominated for her performance in Atonement, she will be the only actress to receive nominations in 5 consecutive decades. Not even Katherine Hepburn achieved that feat.



Edited By flipp525 on 1197337706

[Penelope]

what's with the shooting of the horses? I can't fathom why they would even do it and there's never a real explanation (unless the later part of the magnificent tracking shot where the horses are rating should be our hint at why the horses were shot).

I can only surmise that they woulda shot the horses because they were a cumbersome item that need not be evacuated and at the same time not let them fall into the hands of the enemy.

The only problem with that premise is that the guy who was shooting them had already passed other horses, so I'm not certain that was the reason.

I believe it is; note that the soldiers were also disabling the vehicles--they couldn't take them with them and they didn't want the Germans to have them.

[OscarGuy]

what's with the shooting of the horses? I can't fathom why they would even do it and there's never a real explanation (unless the later part of the magnificent tracking shot where the horses are rating should be our hint at why the horses were shot).

I can only surmise that they woulda shot the horses because they were a cumbersome item that need not be evacuated and at the same time not let them fall into the hands of the enemy.

The only problem with that premise is that the guy who was shooting them had already passed other horses, so I'm not certain that was the reason.

[Penelope]

what's with the shooting of the horses? I can't fathom why they would even do it and there's never a real explanation (unless the later part of the magnificent tracking shot where the horses are rating should be our hint at why the horses were shot).

I can only surmise that they woulda shot the horses because they were a cumbersome item that need not be evacuated and at the same time not let them fall into the hands of the enemy.

[OscarGuy]

BJ...

SPOILERS

Re the "death scenes"

I wonder if the film's style early on (show what Briony thought she saw and then show what actually happened) may have been the impetus for the scenes at the end. Instead of having imagined reality first, then true reality second, it inverts this, all as part of the older Briony's flashbacks. I think it actually works here because of that. And in addition, there's an aching surprise finding out both died...the McAvoy death scene is far more impressive emotionally, the second scene feels drawn out. Having not read the novel, I think it has far more emotional impact designed this way than as you suggest. Those who've already read the novel know the ending, so a metion of it, then the final shot might have been more suitable, but for an audience NOT familiar with the story, the presented scenes are perfect to convey a true sense of understanding. It gives the score a chance to work its magic and the viewer a chance to feel the losses (not pushing past it quickly to a conclusion).

The more I think about the film, the more I'm put off by how tangential everything seems to be. What's the point of the dead children scene? It exemplifies the horrors of war, but it feels completely tacked on. The same goes for the beach scene...and what's with the shooting of the horses? I can't fathom why they would even do it and there's never a real explanation (unless the later part of the magnificent tracking shot where the horses are rating should be our hint at why the horses were shot).

[ITALIANO]

It's a good analysis of the differences between film and novel, Original BJ. And I agree with you on most points.

But I was realizing today that, though I didn't see this movie centuries ago (I think it was mid-September), it hasn't stayed with me, emotionally at least. Vanessa Redgrave's performance has (it's a truly heartbreaking moment), and maybe even James McAvoy's - his purity of expressions reminded me of the great stars of the silents, film acting at its most effective and most "simple" at the same time. These are the only two performances from this movie that really deserve a nomination. But the film itself - it's gone with the wind. Yet of course I had just read the book back then, which may be the reason why the movie is less clear in my mind than it could be.

[The Original BJ]

Haha, I actually thought upon exiting the film that I knew you would love this, Penelope.

I found Atonement: The Film to be quite good, without ever really having enough of its own voice to kick it up a notch into great-great territory; it's certainly not as singular a piece of filmmaking as the novel was a piece of writing.

And yet, minute griping aside, I have to say I was impressed with the adaptation -- Hampton manages to streamline the narrative while still including most of the important beats, the film is perfectly cast, and the heartbreaking ending retains much of its emotional power. I can't say that Joe Wright found a filmic style that really approximates McEwan, but this is a gigantic step above a recent adaptation like Love in the Time of Cholera (which is horribly miscast, poorly paced and structured, and stylistically bland, when Garcia Marquez is anything but).

I loved the surefooted, briskly paced opening (the use of the typewritten title card niftily establishes the film's storytelling motif), as well as Dario Marianelli's percussive score. I'm with Penelope on that one -- I can understand how some might find it intrusive, but I found it vital in propelling the narrative, linking various sections, and all along, continuing that clack-clack of the typewriter...I also appreciated that the film preserved the novel's slightly wicked sense of humor: this ain't no stuffy period piece, handsomely designed though it is.

As the film went on, certain elements did strike me as a little off. (SPOILERS FOLLOW) Perhaps I may be remembering the novel incorrectly, but I know that when reading, I didn't realize Paul had been the one to rape Lola until the climactic Briony-Robbie-Cecilia meeting. Looking back, it made sense, but, like Cecilia, I thought it had been Danny. On film, however, it seems impossible that anyone would think it WASN'T Paul, his character is so overdrawn in his early scenes -- this to me was the first example of the film's slight habit of squashing ambiguities that were so central to the novel. (And later on, I really didn't need a flashback depicting Paul actually raping Lola -- isn't the whole point that Briony's memory is hazy, that she doesn't actually see, much less remember what happened? Isn't it MORE interesting for us to be put in the same position?)

In a similar vein, I didn't much care for the flashback of Robbie remembering his arrest -- this struck me as a too obvious device illustrating how Robbie will never be able to forget the event that defined his life. I would have liked the filmmakers to have found a subtler, more interesting way to convey what haunts Robbie. Also, the Briony/Robbie drowning flashback, which flowed so elegantly in the novel, seems clumsily inserted on film. And I greatly missed the image of the boy's blown off leg in the tree -- why remove one of the novel's most powerful IMAGES when translating from page to screen?

I guess everyone has to fall on some side of the divide re: the Dunkirk shot. I fall somewhere in between: I don't think it's merely showing off, as I did find the sequence visually impressive and emotionally powerful. But my problem is simply that it doesn't seem to fit stylistically with the rest of the film. I guess I take a very different opinion than Penelope on this matter: I didn't think the film was stylistically excessive at all. In fact, I wanted MORE sequences like the Dunkirk shot, more sequences that embellished rather than merely translated the story. As it stands, the Dunkirk shot seems a little out of place in a film that's otherwise restrained (or, as OscarGuy put it, smaller in scope).

MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING OF THE STORY FOLLOW

A word or two on the much-discussed ending: as I said above, I found myself overwhelmed by the power of the finale (I also chuckled a little at the appearance of Anthony Minghella as the interviewer, which I thought added to the filmic self-reflexivity). But I can't say the ending hit the mark completely for me. I sorely missed the Tallis reunion and performance of The Trials of Arabella. Of course, I realize it's not really fair for me to go on about how I missed X from the novel, and Y from the novel...and yet the final performance of Briony's play after all those years struck me as a key moment in the story, one which articulated many of the novel's themes and ideas in a powerful way. (Plus, the fact that this event only tangentially related to The Big Incident allowed McEwan to put forth those ideas in a more compelling, less obvious manner...probably the reason why it was excised!) Also, I didn't need to see Robbie and Cecilia's deaths visualized. I realize that this might be a controversial statement -- the point of filming a novel is indeed to VISUALIZE it -- and yet I can't shake my feeling that there is indeed a very good reason why the novel merely tosses this information off in the last stretch. Robbie and Cecilia's deaths AREN'T part of the story, at least not the one Briony tells -- she doesn't have the luxury of knowing exactly what happened to either of them, and I'm not sure we should either. We have Briony's novel, nothing more, certainly nothing less. Again, I'd rather be left with the ambiguity.

END OF SPOILERS

What's interesting about the cast is that all five major performers acquit themselves very well (yet another terrific SAG Ensemble contender...we've got loads this year), and yet I could see all of them missing Oscar nods for various reason. (Note: someone from this film will be nominated, but no one person is safe at this point.) James McAvoy is very fine: charming and dashing in part one, furious and pained in part two. I hope for a nomination, but I still think he could be Leo/Joe Fiennes-ed out of a nod in favor of more established actors (the young men often have to wait.) Saoirse Ronan is a total find: her performance is poised, commanding, and intelligent, signalling a young girl who's wise beyond her years yet far less wise and mature than she believes she is. Romola Garai is quite moving as Briony's older incarnation, though I suspect internal competition (who's the standout?) could hurt the chances of both. Then there's Vanessa Redgrave, who's final scene is dynamite and devastating...though awfully short to bank on a certain nomination at this point. As for Keira Knightley, I think she's in a precarious position for a nod, actually. While her role is certainly more substantial than in Pride & Prejudice, and I maintain that she's well-cast here, Cecilia is a smallish part by Best Actress standards, and she doesn't really have much of a showcase -- Wright cedes most of the climax to McAvoy. Her chances now rest on the popularity of her film, as well as the fact that she's been on lists for so long. Sometimes these candidates can pull through (Depp in Finding Neverland), but other times they fall by the wayside once people actually get a look at the performance (Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain).

Overall, a very fine film, though, as with Beloved (another recent adaptation I admired), I can't see any reason why everyone shouldn't just pick up the book.

[OscarGuy]

SPOILER

Ok. Here's my problem with Atonement. When Redgrave arrives on screen, I felt it jolt to a stop. The entire scene felt very abrupt and I was alarmed to learn that the movie was basically over...It seemed like such a short film...which is a compliment since it was over 2 hours long. I was actually expecting something a little more epic in scope. I can't say I was disappointed. I thought it had a bittersweet ending that should have made sense from the earlier "false tales", but really didn't. I think Wright's early direction of the pic was quite good. I love the "cross of light" symbolism that ran through the film and the flashback/truth scenes were not as confusing as they could possibly have been.

It's hard to isolate one of the Briony's for praise. All three were quite good, though I wonder why they aren't considered lead? It seems like McAvoy and Knightley were more supporting than the Brionys. They were far more central to the story, so I'm a tad confused at the placement. Sure they are the romantic leads, but really it's only partly their story...but with Redgrave's scene, it does make her out to be more supporting...

I'm still not sure how I felt about the film, which usually means I'll end up appreciating it after some thought.

[Damien]

Lou Lemenick of the NY Post calls it the best picture of the year:

HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS
SWEEPING ROMANCE 'ATONEMENT' DESTINED TO BECOME CLASSIC

December 7, 2007 -- DESCRIBING "Atonement" as the most achingly romantic movie since "Titanic," while totally accurate, doesn't begin to do justice to the across-the-board accomplishments of this hugely entertaining movie. Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton not only blow the Merchant-Ivory dust off the British period movie, they transform Ian McEwan's interior novel into a sweeping epic that speaks to the 21st-century soul.

Their labors are abetted by a dream cast headed by Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, who perfectly inhabit their roles as a mixed-class couple whose love is doomed by a child's lie and World War II.

Knightley is Cecilia Tallis, the sizzlingly sexy older daughter of a wealthy family preparing for a party at a luxe country estate on a perfect summer day in 1935.

Cecilia has taken a fancy to Robbie Turner (McAvoy), her classmate at Cambridge and the cook's son, who is so accepted as a member of the family that he is preparing to study medicine at their expense.

But their dreams are cruelly shattered by Cecilia's 13-year-old sister, a fiercely self-possessed writer named Briony (astounding newcomer Saoirse Ronan).

Briony has a crush on Robbie, and her jealously is inflamed when she misinterprets an innocent encounter between Cecilia and Robbie that she glimpses from a distance.

A misdirected, sexually charged letter and a sexual assault on a young guest provide Briony with an opportunity to invent a false accusation against Robbie that all three characters will regret for the rest of their lives.

The second part of the movie takes place five years later. The war is under way and Robbie - McAvoy ("The Last King of Scotland") brilliantly portrays him as a very changed man - has been released from prison to serve in the Army in France.

Wright's directorial tour-de-force is an unbroken four-minute steadicam shot depicting the chaos enveloping a very sick Robbie during the seaside evacuation of Dunkirk. What might seem like showing off in another movie is dazzling storytelling here, packing in an hour's worth of human misery.

Meanwhile, both Cecilia and the 18-year-old Briony (now played by Romola Garai) are both nurses at military hospitals in London. Briony throws herself into her job to assuage her unbearable guilt, but Cecilia will have nothing to do with her younger sister.

It would be a criminal offense to take the story past here, and spoil the best twist ending since "The Sixth Sense." Yet the movie doesn't depend on surprise for its five-handkerchief ending; I cried even more after I had read McEwan's novel and saw the movie a second time.

As I said, there are many accomplishments in this movie, from the character-defining costumes to the breathtaking cinematography, not to mention Dario Marinelli's lush score, which takes its percussive beats from the clacking of Briony's typewriter keys.

But the movie couldn't cast as haunting a spell if Wright hadn't cast Briony at three different ages with three different actresses who convincingly act, speak and move as a single person.

The third, aged Briony, who appears relatively briefly in the movie's third segment to deliver the coup de grace, is played with consummate skill by Vanessa Redgrave, conveying a lifetime of regret in a few gestures.

Briony is interviewed by director Anthony Minghella, whose "The English Patient" somewhat resembles "Atonement" in its scope, subject matter and literary ambitions. But I don't think they'll be mocking "Atonement" on a sitcom the way "The English Patient" was ridiculed on "Seinfeld."

This has been a remarkable season for movies, with such gems as "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," "No Country for Old Men," "Juno," "American Gangster" and "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead."

"Atonement," though, is the leader of the pack. One for the ages.

The best movie of the year.

[Penelope]

It probably comes as no suprise that I loved Atonement: this is a movie that's right up my alley--literary, intelligent, romantic, complex, with wonderfully subtle humor, and filmed with joyous originality.

It is, I think, about as good an adaptation of a novel as one can get, hitting all the strong points of McEwan's novel while creating its own entity. In fact, the element that some critics are harping on--its stylistic excess--didn't bother me in the least; in fact, I think it's entirely appropriate for this story, since its about imagination carried away--so even if the glorious Dunkirk tracking shot was put in there by Wright just to "show off," it works not just because it's so dazzling, but also because it's of a piece with the rest of the film--embellishing a story, which is what, really, the point is here.

But there were so many other wonderful moments, moments created through choices by Wright and his cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, and by the actors; the scene in which Cecilia and Robbie consumate their love in the library is erotic and honest--indeed, this was the moment, I think, that Keira Knightley finally arrived as an actress, really, for once, filling in the details of the character AND connecting to her co-star.

And McAvoy is simply wonderful; I do hope he gets the nomination, it will be well-deserved--he makes Robbie's longing, dispair and bitterness incredibly palpable; and, Akash, if you didn't think he was sexy before this, I believe you will in this movie. He's absolutely swoon-worthy here.

Of the three Briony's, the best is unquestionably Vanessa Redgrave--she makes that conclusion utterly, excruciatingly heartbreaking; but, it must be said, had not Saoirse Ronan and Romola Garai not given such strong performances as well, Redgrave's turn would still be impressive, but not as moving.

And Dario Marinelli, like Alexandre Desplat, is rapidly becoming one of the best film composers in the business; the score for Atonement, I suspect, may be controversial--too prevalent for some, but for me it worked--like the film itself, it's exquisite, daring, original.

Atonement easily places second, below Assassination of Jesse James, on my top 10 list.

[Damien]

In the New York Observer, Rex Reed and Andrew Sarris both love it: {SPOILERS}

REX:
Despite all expectations, 2007 is turning out to be a sorry year for movies. That’s why Atonement has rejuvenated my flagging energy at the very last minute. Elegantly directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice), meticulously acted by a perfect cast, immaculately adapted by the great British screenwriter Christopher Hampton and lavishly filmed with a respect for both intimate detail and sweeping narrative, Atonement is everything a true lover of literature and movies could possibly hope for. It is unquestionably, without any reservations, my favorite film of the year.

Based on the critically praised best seller by Ian McEwan, it’s a story of a youthful jealousy that leads to a monstrous falsehood that in turn ruins the lives of a disparate group of people, and ultimate retribution that comes decades too late. On the hottest day of the summer in 1935, just a few years before the war, the wealthy, vacationing Tallis family is expecting guests at their vast country estate. Precocious youngest daughter Briony, a fledgling writer of 13, played by the patrician and deeply sensitive newcomer Saoirse Ronan, is impressionable, sexually naïve and resentful of the attention older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) receives from the boys, especially the hunky gardener Robbie (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son, who’s beneath their social station, and whose college education at Cambridge has been financed by their father.

From an upstairs window, Briony watches Cecilia strip off her clothes and lure Robbie into the fountain. Nothing happens beyond a kiss, but Briony’s scheming imagination sets into motion the mischief that will impact their lives forever. When the girls’ older brother Leon (Patrick Kennedy) arrives for the weekend with an arrogant friend who drunkenly assaults a female cousin, Briony falsely identifies the innocent Robbie as the rapist. Convicted and punished for a sex crime, Robbie’s life is ruined. Four years later, he leaves prison and joins the army, but the estranged Cecilia has remained true, and the unjustly separated lovers endure years of grief, desire and emotional tension in the Henry James tradition until they meet in a moving scene set in a terminal cafe right out of Brief Encounter. The repressed Briony, meanwhile, surmounts her own class boundaries by nursing the broken bodies of soldiers in a war-torn hospital, but making amends comes late. Decades later, when she turns the saga into a hugely successful novel for posterity, everyone is relieved that the story had a happy ending. Or did it? In an electrifying finale, offered almost as a postscript, Vanessa Redgrave appears as the dying Briony to publicize her book, still suffering guilt for the damage caused by the deluded fiction of her youth, and reveals the actual facts. Atonement at last? True or false, a writer always has the last word.

The genuinely talented Joe Wright does an engrossing job of turning literature into cinematic poetry. In one magnificently constructed scene after another, he transports us from the idyllic sunlight and chlorophyll of the British countryside darkened by the storm clouds of approaching war, to the blood and chloroform of the trenches in France, the terror in the streets and bomb shelters of London and the galvanizingly surreal nightmare on the beaches of Dunkirk, shot in the perpetual half-light of an abandoned carnival with a bombed carousel in the backdrop. The sets and costumes stagger the imagination. And a uniformly brilliant cast brings three-dimensional humanity to the pages of Christopher Hampton’s script. The impulsive Briony, who sends the wrong man to hell, is played at different stages in her life by two remarkable actresses—Ms. Ronan is a staggeringly assured youngster, and Romola Garai as the mature version of the same tortured character is haunting. They both outclass and upstage the lovely but serenely bland Keira Knightley, who is all cold angles without soft edges. As the wronged man, James McAvoy fulfills the promise he showed in The Last King of Scotland, easily emerging as the film’s star in an honest, heart-rending performance of strength and integrity that overcomes the romantic slush it might have been.

Atonement is both a lyrical adaptation of great fiction and a revelation of the potential power of cinema to twist, mould, convince and entertain. Cynics may dismiss it as a period weepie from the Merchant/Ivory school, but Atonement is so much more than that. The five-minute tracking shot of the carnage at Dunkirk, the rush of water surging through a tube station as people die seeking shelter from the blitz, nurses marching in formation around a hospital as the lights go off, one by one, above them—all indelible images that transform a great book many called “unfilmable” into an overwhelming experience that has revived my faith in motion pictures.
=======================

SARRIS:

Joe Wright’s Atonement, from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan, transforms a misguided adolescent error of judgment with tragic consequences into an ironic epic of a heroic period in British history. This serves to illuminate how helpless we all are when we try to swim against the current of global forces, not to mention the inexorable tide of time itself. This film is also one of the most successful adaptations of a distinguished novel I have ever seen. It gives me renewed faith that good and great movies can still be made even under the present chaotic conditions in the world’s film industries, and in the proliferation of technological substitutes for old-fashioned habitual moviegoing.

I must confess at this point that, try as I may, I cannot explain why Atonement is so good without giving away its convoluted trick plot. So those of my readers who have either not read the book or read or heard anything about the twists in the film’s narrative are advised to read no further in this essentially rave review, if they are in the habit of feeling betrayed by the critic’s disclosure of the story’s details.

The fact is that I had not yet read the book when I saw its screen adaptation. Would I have liked the film less without the element of surprise if I had? I don’t think so, but I cannot be sure of what my hypothetically more informed reaction would have been in this particular instance. These days there are so many spillers of the beans, from the ever more copious coming attractions to the ever more uninhibited entertainment bloggers, that we reviewers are caught in a constant quandary. To tell or not to tell, that is the problem. Yet if I choose to tell on this occasion, it is because I genuinely feel that there is no other way to review it, particularly since I am notorious as a fanatical defender of narrative in the cinema as a sine qua non even against the most accomplished cinematic experiments in pure abstraction.

The first part of Atonement begins and ends on a fateful summer day and night in 1935 on the wealthy Tallis family’s luxurious English estate in Surrey. (Actually, this sequence was filmed on location in and around a privately owned mansion in Shropshire.) It is there that we first encounter Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a precocious writer of plays, of which her mother, Emily Tallis (Harriet Walter) enthusiastically approves. We encounter also Briony’s older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), who has become romantically attracted to Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the Cambridge-educated son of the Tallis family housekeeper, Grace Turner (Brenda Blethyn). Robbie has always been treated as part of the Tallis family, and Briony has also developed a crush on him, but then she spots him embracing Cecilia, and is outraged by his betrayal. Hence, when a young female guest of the Tallis family is criminally molested in the night and cannot identify her assailant, Briony steps forward to accuse Robbie of the crime out of pure spite. Indeed, Briony goes so far as to convince an initially skeptical police inspector that she had seen Robbie furtively leaving the scene of the offense. The sequence ends with Robbie being taken away by the police as his mother bangs angrily on the police car windows. We learn later that Robbie is promptly convicted and imprisoned for a brief time until he is persuaded by the authorities to join the army and thus get his sentence reduced on the eve of World War II.

From that fateful day and night in 1935, the second part of Atonement flashes-forward to 1940, on the eve of the British evacuation of its expeditionary force from Dunkirk. Briony, now 18, and now played by Romola Garai, and Cecilia (still played by Ms. Knightley) are serving as nurses in two different military hospitals in London. We learn that Cecilia has never stopped loving Robbie, and she makes him promise to return to her when the war is over. By now, Briony has deeply regretted her action, and seeks to make amends in any way she can, particularly when, in a flash of memory, she recalls another male dinner guest as having been the real culprit.

Meanwhile, Robbie is wandering with two comrades in arms across empty poppy fields in the general retreat of the British and French from Hitler’s victorious Nazi legions.

All the book’s locations in both Britain and France were replicated entirely on British soil, at times with masses of extras. A great deal of stylization is employed in the creation of the historical spectacles, but we do not realize until almost the very end of the film how much of the story has been invented in Briony’s fertile but now novelistic imagination to atone for the actually irrevocable wrong she inflicted on Robbie and Cecilia.

What is most remarkable about the film, and most deserving of praise and admiration, is the astounding continuity of Briony’s character, sustained by three different actresses: Ms. Ronan as Briony at 13, Ms. Garai as Briony at 18, and the ineffable Vanessa Redgrave, one of the great actresses of the 20th and 21st centuries, as Briony in her climactically repentant 70’s, confessing her fictions in her self-proclaimed final novel, which makes up most of what we have been credulously looking at as real in the second part of the film. Her readers, the elderly Briony tells her interviewer, would never appreciate the bitter, brutal finality of the truth. Despite the consoling images she provides in her novel, and reenacted in the film, of Robbie and Cecilia being reunited after Dunkirk, and walking hand-in-hand on the beach, with the White Cliffs of Dover in the background, both Robbie and Cecilia, in fact, die from enemy action in Dunkirk and London respectively, in 1940. It hurts me even now to report this discordance between a hopeful fiction and a hopeless dose of reality, for which there is not adequate atonement in Briony’s lifetime.

Mr. Wright and Mr. Hampton have fashioned an enduring cinematic masterpiece out of a very difficult and diffuse novel, albeit one written with a very precise brilliance. I would extend my kudos to the three actresses who reportedly worked very hard to coordinate their distinctive bodies to correspond to the single character of Briony. Ms. Knightley and Mr. McAvoy make a very complex and charismatic loving couple as Cecilia and Robbie. Finally, for the first time ever, I am going to single out a hair and makeup designer: Ivana Primorac, for her work on the Three Brionys in One.

[Damien]

A pan from A.O. Scott in the New York Times:

Lies, Guilt, Stiff Upper Lips
By A. O. SCOTT


Joe Wright’s “Atonement” begins in the endlessly photogenic, thematically pregnant interwar period. The setting is a rambling old British country estate where trim dinner jackets and shimmering silk dresses are worn; cigarettes are smoked with sharp inhalations that create perfect concavities of cheekbone; and the air is thick with class tension and sexual anxiety. Heavy clouds are gathering on the geopolitical horizon, which lends a special poignancy to the domestic comings and goings. This charged, hardly unfamiliar atmosphere provides, in the first section of the film, some decent, suspenseful fun, a rush of incident and implication. Boxy cars rolling up the drive; whispers of scandal and family secrets; coitus interruptus in the library, all set to the implacable rhythm of typewriter keys.



Two characters make significant use of a typewriter — one is an aspiring playwright, the other a yearning rural swain — but the sound of the machine is co-opted by Dario Marianelli, who wrote the movie’s score and who conjoins the clack-clacking of mechanical composition with the steady plink of a repeated piano note. At a climactic moment Brenda Blethyn, who can be as subtle an actress as Mr. Marianelli is a composer, leaps screaming from the darkness and begins beating on the hood of a car with an umbrella, a tocsin that joins the plink and the clack in a small symphony of literal-minded irrelevance.



That pretty much describes the rest of “Atonement,” piously rendered by the screenwriter Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan’s novel. This is not a bad literary adaptation; it is too handsomely shot and Britishly acted to warrant such strong condemnation. “Atonement” is, instead, an almost classical example of how pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into film can be. The respect that Mr. Wright and Mr. Hampton show to Mr. McEwan is no doubt gratifying to him, but it is fatal to their own project.



Unlike Mr. Wright’s brisk, romantic film version of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” “Atonement” fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based. Mr. McEwan’s prose pulls you in immediately and drags you through an intricate, unsettling story, releasing you in a shaken, wrung-out state. The film, after a tantalizing start, sputters to a halt in a welter of grandiose imagery and hurtling montage.



Keira Knightley, who also starred in “Pride and Prejudice,” plays Cecilia Tallis, a rich girl who discovers she is loved by and in love with Robbie (James McAvoy), the son of one of her family’s servants. Their furtive, ardent courtship is observed by Cecilia’s younger sister, Briony (played at 13 by the remarkably poised Saoirse Ronan — pronounced SEER-Sha), whose combination of precocity and confusion precipitates a household catastrophe.



A bigger one arrives in the form of World War II, and it is here, in the transition from hothouse psychodrama to historical pseudo-epic, that “Atonement” runs aground, losing dramatic coherence and intellectual focus. Romola Garai has taken over the role of Briony (in a coda, she will age gracefully into Vanessa Redgrave), who works as a nurse in London. Cecilia, now estranged from the family, does similar duty, and Robbie stumbles toward the beach at Dunkirk.



There are some powerful images — of scared and tired soldiers in France, of bloody wounds and shattered limbs in London — but the film’s treatment of the war has a detached, secondhand feeling. And even the most impressive sequences have an empty, arty virtuosity. The impression left by a long, complicated battlefield tracking shot is pretty much “Wow, that’s quite a tracking shot,” when it should be “My God, what a horrible experience that must have been.”



The main casualty of the film’s long, murky middle and end sections is the big moral theme — and also the ingenious formal gimmick — that provides the book with some of its intensity and much of its cachet. As the title suggests, “Atonement” is fundamentally about guilt and the attempt to overcome it, and about the tricky, tragically imperfect power of art to compensate for real-life crimes and misdemeanors.



Without giving too much away, I will say that the power of the story depends on its believability, on the audience’s ability to perceive Robbie and Cecilia in wartime as suffering, flesh-and-blood creatures. Mr. McAvoy and Ms. Knightley sigh and swoon credibly enough, but they are stymied by the inertia of the filmmaking, and by the film’s failure to find a strong connection between the fates of the characters and the ideas and historical events that swirl around them.



“Atonement” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual situations and graphic combat violence.



Edited By Damien on 1197072381

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The Vancouver Sun gave it four -and - a - half stars. Critics saw this film at the VIFF earlier in the year.

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CHICAGO SUN-TIMES gives it four stars.

December 7, 2007

Cast & Credits
Robbie Turner: James McAvoy
Cecilia Tallis: Keira Knightley
Briony, age 18: Romola Garai
Briony, age 13: Saoirse Ronan
Older Briony: Vanessa Redgrave
Grace Turner: Brenda Blethyn

By Roger Ebert

"Atonement" begins on joyous gossamer wings, and descends into an abyss of tragedy and loss. Its opening scenes in an English country house between the wars are like a dream of elegance, and then a 13-year-old girl sees something she misunderstands, tells a lie and destroys all possibility of happiness in three lives, including her own.

The movie's opening act is like a breathless celebration of pure heedless joy, a demonstration of the theory that the pinnacle of human happiness was reached by life in an English country house between the wars. Of course that was more true of those upstairs than downstairs. We meet Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley), the bold, older daughter of an old family, and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), their housekeeper's promising son, who is an Oxford graduate, thanks to the generosity of Cecilia's father. Despite their difference in social class, they are powerfully attracted to each other, and that leads to a charged erotic episode next to a fountain on the house lawn.

This meeting is seen from an upstairs window by Cecilia's younger sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan), who thinks she sees Robbie mistreating her sister in his idea of rude sex play. We see the same scene later from Robbie and Cecilia's point of view, and realize it involves their first expression of mutual love. But Briony does not understand, has a crush on Robbie herself, and as she reads an intercepted letter and interrupts a private tryst, her resentment grows until she tells the lie that will send Robbie out of Cecilia's reach.

Oh, but the earlier scenes have floated effortlessly. Cecilia, as played by Knightley with stunning style, speaks rapidly in that upper-class accent that sounds like performance art. When I hear it, I despair that we Americans will ever approach such style with our words, which march out like baked potatoes. She is so beautiful, so graceful, so young, and Robbie may be working as a groundsman but is true blue, intelligent and in love with her. They deserve each other.

But that is not to be, as you know if you have read the Ian McEwan best seller that the movie is inspired so faithfully by. McEwan, one of the best novelists alive, allows the results of Briony's vindictive behavior to grow offstage until we meet the principals again in the early days of the war. Robbie has enlisted and been posted to France. Cecilia is a nurse in London, and so is Briony, now 18, trying to atone for what she realizes was a tragic error. There is a meeting of the three, only one, in London, that demonstrates to them what they have all lost.

The film cuts back and forth between the war in France and the bombing of London, and there is a single (apparently) unbroken shot of the beach at Dunkirk that is one of the great takes in film history, achieved or augmented with CGI though it is. (If it looks real, in movie logic, it is real.) After an agonizing trek from behind enemy lines, Robbie is among the troops waiting to be evacuated, in a Dunkirk much more of a bloody mess than legend would have us believe. In the months before, the lovers have written, promising each other the happiness they have earned.

Each period and scene in the movie is compelling on its own terms, and then compelling on a deeper level as a playing out of the destiny that was sealed beside the fountain on that perfect summer's day. It is only at the end of the film, when Briony, now an aged novelist played by Vanessa Redgrave, reveals facts about the story that we realize how thoroughly, how stupidly, she has continued for a lifetime to betray Cecilia, Robbie and herself.

The structure of the McEwan novel and this film directed by Joe Wright is relentless. How many films have we seen that fascinate in every moment and then, in the last moments, pose a question about all that has gone before, one that forces us to think deeply about what betrayal and atonement might really entail?

Wright, who also directed Knightley in his first film, "Pride and Prejudice," shows a mastery of nuance and epic, sometimes in adjacent scenes. In the McEwan novel, he has a story that can hardly fail him and an ending that blindsides us with its implications. This is one of the year's best films, a certain best picture nominee.