If you're looking for yet another WW2 romantic tale with gorgeous leads

Rating: 5/10 (11 December 2007)

If you're looking for yet another WW2 sad/romantic tale with two gorgeous leads, a precocious point of view, and dependable turns and twists, then this movie will be your cup of chi. I think a second look will reveal a number of significant problems.
First, there are trronged party or thoubling improbabilities at the key plot point of the movie. Two young children have gone missing in the English countryside at night. What does the household do; send everyone out in groups or at least in twos to search? No, they go out alone, including the boys' sister who is a stranger in the area. That my friends is a setup straight out of the B horror flick manual.
Second, after a supposed dastardly act has been committed against the sister, when Robbie Turner, the male lead and fall guy, returns later that night with the missing children, he doesn't act reasonably. Returning with the goods, one would expect him to call out something like, "hey everyone, I found them. They were in the south meadow, in a haystack; cold and tired, but no worse for wear," or something along those lines in typical British casual humility. Instead, he is suspiciously mute and cautious for no reason at all.
Third, it seems no one including the police found it unlikely that an upstanding young man and semi-member of the family chose the night of a hunt for lost children to rape a visitor and then, as an after rape distraction, go out and actually find the missing children when no one else could.
If we can suspend disbelief about these several points, then it works fairly well as a WW2 sad romance, until the end that is, where it attempts a deeper moral aspect. The story jumps to the present, where we discover what we thought was the action, was actually a visualization of the plot of a new book by another member of the household, Briony Tallis, a now elderly author who is flogging her latest and possibly last book, on tour. The book is semi-biographical, in that events which happened to her and her family are the backbone of the plot. The author has waited till the end of her life to admit a great wrong she committed as a girl to several people and had never taken responsibility for. Now that she has completed a successful literary career and is safe behind age and a disabling disease, she will write about her fell deed. Well almost; actually the book has a happy ending or as the author puts it, a more hopeful ending. The truth will be revealed only in a cable channel book tour interview.
The question I pose is, did she alter the truth to make the book more hopeful or to be more sellable? That is, if she were genuinely interested in using her terrible experience to warn people about being overly romantic and leaping to serious conclusions based on impressions, then why wouldn't she have written the book telling the truly tragic result of her actions. Instead she manufactures a Happy Ever After Ending, just as she manufactured a HEAE so many decades before by purposely jumping into a weed filled pond when she couldn't swim so she could be "saved."
Which leads me to a second point, is it because Briony never outgrew the fanciful view of life and herself in it, that she confuses confession for atonement. Atonement is making amends or reparation, or paying for someone elses wrong doing. What she did was make a confession, an admission of guilt, and she did that half-*ssed.