one of the best films of recent years

Rating: 9/10 (8 June 2009)

This is a remarkably audacious and original film experience. Playing with typical "period" set pieces and devices before descending into what could only be described as a post-modern hell, it deliberately angers and frustrates the audience by not only with-holding vital information but by offering false information and later cynically dashing viewers' hopes by grabbing them back. Such an effort could be ruined by general confusion and mis-placed intentions if the entire film wasn't so thoroughly polemical and even critical of its primary characters. In the end, the film titled "Atonement" seems in some sense to be about the impossibility of such a glowing emotion, and the film's purpose seems to be to tantalize the audience with the possibility of redemption and peace while perpetually dangling it out of reach like the proverbial carrot in front of the mule.
The basic plot setup is as heartbreaking as it is simple -- a young girl of privilege named Briony (Saoirse Ronan) mis-interprets and mis-represents events which she has witnessed in order to frame a young charge of her father's estate (James McAvoy) with a rape which he clearly did not commit. His lover, Briony's sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is left with an abiding bitterness towards her sister and her entire family for their class-based complicity in the frame-up. Robbie (McAvoy) enlists in the army to get out of prison, leading to a separation that tears the lovers' lives apart and leaves Briony (played in the middle section by Romola Garai and in the final portion by Vanessa Redgrave) without any outlet for her growing regret and self-loathing.
What's really profound about the film, in my opinion, is the fact that even Briony's relatively mature need for "atonement" is a form of self-indulgence. She can't live with herself anymore -- but why should Cecilia or Robbie care about that? What could she actually offer them, to make up for so much that she has taken away? As the film gradually reveals through flashbacks that even at the tender age of 13 Briony's motivations were confused by sexual jealousy, our sympathy for her character dissipates even as our sense of the overall tragedy deepens. The audience is driven further and further from sympathy with Briony, and yet we cannot for a moment doubt the sincerity of her desire to set her wrongs to right. It is the impossibility of this atonement, more than the lovers' sad fate, that really forms the heart of the tragedy. Even in the final portions of the film with Redgrave playing an elderly Briony who has now sought to give the lovers some form of atonement by giving them an artificial "happy ending" through her semi-autobiography of the events, we are subtly led by the writers and the director to realize that she has still never atoned for the evil that she did. None of this is by way of making Briony an inhuman or an uncaring person -- tragedy in its high and classical sense requires not simply sadness but the impossible longing for a higher character than we can achieve as humans. Briony did the best that she could at all times, but it was never enough to erase a decision that had already been made and whose consequences had already been felt.
The performances by McAvoy, Knightley, and Garai are particularly effective and memorable. There is never a moment where the actors and actresses put themselves above the material. The director's style is at times a bit showy, particularly in the Dunkirk beach sequences, but these scenes are so gorgeous and effective that any consciousness of the film process must be overcome by the sheer power of the images. There are a few scenes that seemed un-necessary or ill-placed to me, especially a sequence with McAvoy discovering slaughtered children in a field. But McAvoy's performance in that scene is so powerful that once again I'm inclined to overlook any kind of misplaced emphasis and to simply admit that what works can't be fixed. This is the rarest kind of great film -- a film that leaves us with a truly profound sadness, a sadness that is only enhanced by the beauty and grace of the proceedings. To think that we as human beings can reach so far, and grasp so little.