The Go-Between meets The English Patient

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2007)

It's easy to imagine that many people at Working Title were very excited when they decided to put ATONEMENT in production, since they could be aware that with its mixture of love and death and with its setting during the second world war that could be the right occasion to achieve a sort of new English PATIENT. But since the movie is based upon Ian McEwan's masterpiece, the final result established itself as something different and, in some ways, more interesting, without being necessarily a better movie than Minghella's one. Directed by Joe Wright,in his sophomore effort after the critically acclaimed Pride & Prejudice (but actually in his resume you can find a lot of TV works),the movie is written by Christopher Hampton and it's quite faithful to its source material (as typical by Hampton). So everyone who read the Booker Prize finalist novel knows that the movie can be ideally distinguished in two parts (and a resolutive epilogue set many years after). The first part tells the chronicle of a special day of the summer 1935 during which the lives of the main protagonists are branded. Briony Tallis (played by the extraordinary newcomer Saoirse Ronan), the younger daughter of a rich family, is a child with a vivid imagination; she dreams to become a writer but she's having also her first crush. The "object of her desire" is Robbie Turner (the promising and charismatic James McAvoy), a young man, whose mother is one of the family servants. Tallis family paid the college for Robbie and he's also a good friend of Briony's older siblings. Actually Briony doesn't know that Robbie and her sister Cecilia (the always ravishing Keira Knightley, very convincing in her first adult role, it's hard to forget her, especially when she wears that green dress...) are in love therefore when she sees something from the window of her bedroom, she misunderstands and when Robbie ask her to deliver a letter (and besides a wrong one) to Cecilia, she can't stop from reading it and so...as you can see you can find reminiscences from THE GO-BETWEEN, even if Briony is more unreliable than the young boy in that film. But you can see the influence of Losey's classic (which was written by the future Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter) even more in the atmosphere and in the choice to handle the time. Briony accuses Robbie of a crime he didn't commit, even without any proofs, everybody (except the loving Cecilia) believe her and Robbie finishes in prison. This part is the more particular even if at the beginning the description of the house and the dynamics of the characters could appear a little bit boring. But while the drama is erupting, the tension raises notably, thanks also to the music score by the talented Dario Marianelli (who received an Oscar nomination thanks to PRIDE & PREJUDICE and it won't be so shocking if he'll have another one for this new collaboration with Wright). The second part is set 4 years later, during the war. Cecilia is estranged by her family, she's a nurse now and she's still in love with Robbie who is a soldier and he's in mission in France, where he also witnesses the evacuation of Dunkerque. In the meantime Briony (now played by Romola Garai, whose perf is quite weaker than Ronan's and also than Vanessa Redgrave's who replaces her in the epilogue) has grown up, she still wants to become a writer but she also has understood her mistakes, so she is intentioned to atone them: just like her sister she's working as a nurse, she wants to meet Cecilia and Robbie to tell them she's sorry and that she is going to to exculpate the young man from the charge, even if it won't be so easy...in this part the material becomes more ebullient, but Wright is quite apt to manage it, even when he's tempted by the virtuosity (for example the Dunkerque sequence, shown in a long take). Briony accomplishes her atonement just at the end of her life, after to have become a writer, in a way it could be wrong to bring forward... Quite ambitious in its seemingly realistic system (in this context the first part is superior, because more surprising), the movie is rather satisfying even because the director didn't choose to direct his attention on the more agreeable components (the doom of the two lovers, Cecilia's devotion), showing he doesn't look for the simpler solutions. Let's hope that also in his future films Wright keep this will to risk, and maybe tomorrow we could see his filmography with astonished admiration.