The Cat's Pajamas

Rating: Null/10 (21 April 2015)

"I wouldn't necessarily believe everything Briony tells you. She's rather fanciful." - Cecilia Tallis
Joe Wright directs "Atonement", a film based on a novel by Ian McEwan. The plot? In 1935, the thirteen year old daughter of a wealthy family, Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), falsely accuses a servant's son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), of sexually abusing a teenage girl. Turner is arrested and jailed for this alleged crime. This arrest tears Robbie away from Briony's older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), a woman whom he loves.
"Atonement's" first half is mostly excellent. Stylishly directed, the film watches as Briony misreads the adult world around her. To her naive eyes, the sexual tension between Cecilia and Robbie thus constitutes a "perversion". A "perversion" which Briony decides makes Robbie a "sex maniac" and so "rapist". That adults readily believe Briony's story speaks to the inequities and injustices of Britain's firmly entrenched class system.
At the half-way mark, though, "Atonement" morphs into another film. Here Robbie joins the army, is sent to France, fights in World War 2, sees many horrors, assembles in Dunkirk with thousands of other soldiers and dies of septicaemia. All the while, Robbie and Cecilia pine for one another. Deeply in love, they're never reunited. Briony blames herself for this. The film closes with Briony, now an elderly woman, writing a fantastical novel in which Robbie and Cecilia live "happily ever after", a gesture which Briony hopes will exonerate Robbie and so atone for her lies.
"Atonement's" second half is mostly kitsch. Tastelessly voluptuous, the film unfolds like a bad David Lean movie ("Brief Encounter", "Doctor Zhivago", "Ryan's Daughter"), every moment straining for unwarranted grandeur. By the time Wright hits us with his virtuosic Dunkirk sequence – an elaborate long take that seems pulled from Jancso's "The Red and the White" - it's hard not to laugh. The film has stopped being about people and problems, and started being about expensively dressed clichés. Robbie and Cecilia aren't just a couple of lovers, but a monument to every tragically wronged couple. They aren't just torn apart, but torn apart by WAR, ruined by RAPE and separated by OCEANS! Because the elderly Briony is suffering from "vascular dementia", and because the younger Briony is a childish romantic, Wright assumes that his aesthetic, which is florid, fantastical and at times unreliable (the film's soundtrack contains a feverishly typing typewriter), is befitting. Wright's film, after-all, is the very hokey novel Briony is writing. But self-conscious kitsch is still kitsch. More importantly, though McEwan's prose was similarly overwrought, he was parodying readers who yearn for kitsch. Wright, in contrast, is dead serious; he genuinely loves kitsch.
Virtually all of McEwan's books find adults and children losing their innocence after encountering some traumatic event. Consider "The Child in Time", in which a missing child shatters a couple's domestic existence. Consider too "Enduring Love", in which a balloon accident torments a middle-aged couple, and "The Cement Garden", in which children cover up and deal with the deaths of their parents.
McEwan's lead characters also typically carry a corruptive secret which gradually expels them from their families or communities. Be it pregnancies, rapes, illicit romances or murders, his characters tortuously conceal this secret, only to cathartically release it during the novel's climax. We see this in "Atonement". But Briony's crime is not simply that she is a liar and bad novelist, but that she acts like a novelist at all. For McEwan, Briony is guilty of creating fiction. She is guilty of storytelling, which is seen to be inherently corrupt and corrupting. This resolutely postmodern theme – the unreliability of "art" and its inability to convey the "whole truth" – has long been McEwan's pet obsession. As such, McEwan's novel persecutes both Briony and his readers for their compulsive need to tidy up life's messiness with familiar plots and neat resolutions. Time and time again, McEwan condemns the limiting projections of artists, the trite desires of readers and demonstrates the implications of fictionality. The result is a novel, like Nabokov's "Lolita", which attempts to comment on its obvious falsity (its construction as fiction, and the dangers this masks), whilst at the same time trying to convey "reality". None of this is captured in Wright's "Atonement", which works primarily as an old-fashioned tale of love interuptus.
6/10 – Worth one viewing. See any film by Atom Egoyan for this material done better.