Beautifully Sad

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2008)

Joe Wright has master eye for the camera. He seems to like to tell the story by having characters in the most beautiful settings he can imagine or create. Atonement is no different and, in fact, I might say a trifle more beautiful and much sadder than his previous work in Pride & Prejudice. While not among my top tier film masterpieces of the year this comes quite close with its great story design and strong performances. And in a year full of sad films it does not quite the punch of the films with the message, but rather just sticks to the tale and tells is exquisitely. This is a tale of misunderstanding and of course, atonement.
The tale begins of a little girl, Briony, played fantastically by Saoirse Ronan, who is typing a play up and is quite excited about it. Things do not go so well though when she wants to see the play done. Circumstances are bad for the visiting children and she has to make sacrifices, but then she gets a doozy of an idea when she misconstrues a situation from a far of her sister and the gardener. More errors are made on both sides further along as she jumps to conclusions with a creative mind, the gardener writes and sends the wrong letter, and of course, Briony can resist a read when she is entrusted with it. The sins and misinterpretations of one day and one night have devastating repercussions with jail being the least of worries when war comes.
I will point out one of my few quirks about the situation here. I do not get why the pair did not just talk over the situation with Briony when she saw them in the library. It just made it that much more muddled. Sure Briony did the telling and jumped to the conclusion, but they offered her no explanation and she was young impressionable and the other cousin agreed to the lie.
Well anyways, besides my reservations about how the situation arose and where the blame was cast, I became enthralled in how Wright broached the war and the incredible makeup that was used in the hospital scenes. That was quite a spectacle and made one shudder a bit without being harsh. He did much the same with the Dunkirk sequence, which was disgusting in the horror of the situation and beautiful with how the camera moved across it all. For a guy who I heard does not like period pieces, Wright is a natural nay a master at it.