Pretentious Mess

Rating: 2/10 (1 February 2008)

At the outset I will state that I did not like the novel on which this movie is based. It's not that I don't like the work of Ian MacEwan - I loved "Saturday" - but to my dread, the novel which I thought shallow to begin with was made into an even shallower movie.
I wasn't going to bother seeing it at all, but did on the recommendations of many friends who literally raved about it. Particularly the scenes of the war and old London.
There was literally no chemistry between the two leads and the direction of "lunge and thrust" in a key love scene repels rather than engages. I find Keira Knightly affected in the extreme, her pouty lips and chopped off sentences did not engage sympathy. She seemed alienated from everyone.
I was in a small mature audience at the screening and there was a lot of laughter at what should have been emotional scenes which again detracted from any investment in the film itself.
The story is cliché ridden and I thought, several times, it would have done better in more sensitive hands. I found the direction choppy and frantic. The timeline moves back and forth with no valid reasoning behind it apart from fooling the audience.
The war scenes are well done and would have worked better in another movie entirely. I found them ghostly and surreal, particularly the singing, the shooting of the horses, etc.
I beg the question: why are so many nominated movies so dismally awful this year? "Atonement" I found completely overrated, there was literally no sublety (in a movie that begged for it) and the characters were all distant, not one of them got my sympathy. Possibly it might have worked a lot better as a mini-series, the time frame of the film itself was too short to explore the back story of each key character and particularly the key feature of the love between Ce and Robbie. Was it simply lust? The basic story revolved around Briony (Saoirse Ronan) who is that beloved child of British movies, - a precocious, pretentious, self-absorbed writer. She reads a letter sent by the medical student son Robby, (James McAvoy) of the family housekeeper, to Briony's older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley). Subsequently she witnesses scenes between them and a scene between a house-guest and a young girl and invents a story that puts the kybosh on the blossoming romance and sends our hero to jail and then off to war.
Some of the more mawkish scenes involve his attempts to re-unite with Cecilia. Cecilia, meanwhile, keeps her passion intact by abandoning her family to work as a waitress and waiting patiently for Robby.
There it is, I won't spoil the rest. Suffice to say it is a melodrama of a type of movie that were best done in the 1920's but best left alone in the twenty first century.
2 out of 10.