Mind of a Writer

Rating: 8/10 (22 March 2009)

At the heart of each movie is the screenwriter, sometimes in collaboration with a novelist (pre-ordained studio junk notwithstanding). There are too many poor attempts at post-modern self-reference in film, but there are also too many critics trying to dig up that post-modernism where it never had primacy.
But this is a wonderful example of it done right.
As a natural writer Briony views ambiguous events in her childhood and shapes and directs them according to the compass of her craft (writers do this into adulthood, normal people stop in adolescence). Everything after the rape scene is her invention, and it adds a rich level of viewership watching and knowing that these characters' fates are entirely in the hands of a child. The narrative takes turns of its own, all originally conjured by a jealous mind (which all writers possess). A mind that couldn't accept reality as it was, no matter how ambiguous (all reality is), and so had to change it.
Halfway through though she overcomes that jealousy within her own story by abandoning her authorship and adjusting her own character to the mold of the people she's damned: by becoming a nurse like Cecelia, and giving up "her place at Cambridge to do something practical" just like Robbie. This is her real atonement: damning herself to the loveless life she created in others' names, a monastical sort of atonement. Giving her victims a fairy tale ending is just another side of that.
Some of the meta-narrative highlights that stand out for me are Robbie's dreams which occur in reverse slow motion, almost as if he's trying to undo the weave that he's been written into. The recurring imagery is wonderful and like a detailed rug it reminds us of the repeated patterns that make up the whole (submersion in water is probably the most critical for lots of reasons). I think all these images and themes coalesce in the single-shot sequence at Dunkirk, a remarkable shot -- ferris wheels, dying horses, drunken soldiers, repressive authority -- all icons of childhood or dying childhood, all at a critical point in the plot, all on a beach in which our hero is stranded, just as he is in the story.
It's no accident that the seed of this narrative tree is discovery of sexuality, the moment all real writers hear the starting gun.