Expansion

Rating: 8/10 (16 December 2007)

Atonement starts at a great English country house on a hot summer day before the Second World War. It speaks of the attraction between two young Cambridge graduates, Cecily Tallis (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy). Despite their shared educational background, Cecily is upper class (her family owns the great house) and Robbie is the son of one of the family's servants, and out of this disparity comes a remarkable and rather tragic story in the novel by Ian McEwan which Joe Wrightwho directed Ms. Knightley in Pride and Prejudiceworking this time from a screenplay by the skillful Christopher Hampton, has made into an impressive movie.
The trouble with a movie that's a literary adaptation is that you may have read the book, especially when the book is as good as Atonement. Ian McEwan may not be a great writer but he's certainly a very good one. He writes delicious, intelligent sentences and with them tells surprising, quietly bold tales. The best film adaptation of a McEwan novel is Andrew Birkin's The Cement Garden. The Cement Garden, it's worth noting, is haunting and strange and touches on one of the most ancient of taboos, but as a story it's simple in its basic elements. Atonement is many-leveled and far grander and more emotionally fraught, encompassing as it does the decline of a ruling class and a great war and themes of sex and love and class and the danger of ignorance and the capacity of literature to redeem a lifeor not. Filming this novel is an ambitious task.
McEwan's Atonement is a particularly dangerous novel to film because it's so easy to make the details overblown and lose the essence of the thing. This is what Joe Wright has done. He's still produced a beautiful, occasionally engaging and involving (but sometimes fatiguing) movie replete with moments of shock and sorrow and grandeur. But the book wasn't about wounded troops massed on the beach or an Underground tunnel being floodedthough these are among the more memorable images of the film. McEwan's Atonement really isn't about the grandeur of pre-War upper class English country life--whose details are just sketched in deftly by the novelist while he focuses on the emotions, the suspicions, the doubts, the passions. Nor, as one reads McEwan's novel, does one hear in one's mind the sound of large string orchestra playing with an incessant overlay of a loudly clacking typewriter. But in the film one never gets away from that. This is one of the reasons that novels about or from any period are timeless: the period trappings don't overwhelm, because we don't have to see them.
As Henry Green wrote, "Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations ... Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone ..."
Atonement, the novel, is about the mistake of a naïve, willful, dangerously over-imaginative girl that plays into the class prejudices of a great English family and ruins several lives. These are events that at various points you really cannot stage at all. They're things you have to tell aboutor rather, hint at, and make the audience think about. Where the book is delicateyet disturbingtears from the stonethe movie is more operatic, and not always opera of the highest order. It may be Merchant-Ivory or Masterpiece Theater, but it's not Brideshead Revisited. As Beresford-Howe said in Film Threat, "Imagine if the team that made The English Patient tried to make the same kind of movie, with even more brave-lads-fighting-the-Jerries porn and this time with Extra Added English country manor porn, and without really good actors, and this movie is what you'd have." This is the sad truth. One wants to like Knightley and McAvoy and they've been excellent in other roles, but they aren't quite up to their jobs this time, and neither are the two young women who play the younger sister Briony, Saoirse Roman as the eleven-year-old girl who makes the false accusations, and Romola Garai as the repentant eighteen-year-old. Briony is central. She needs to be infuriating, yet sympatheticwhich isn't so easy, and neither actress quite has those qualities. There is a great actress at the end in Vanessa Redgrave, with her immense authority and wisdom, as the aged, soon-to-die Briony, who appears in one speech to a TV interviewer about her latest, and last novel, which is called Atonement. But this is just last-minute exposition and since the message is one of failure and quiet despair, it's not the grand finale the elaborately staged scenes have led one to expect. Too much of the movie's time is thrown away on great paneled hallways and country house lawns, bright lipstick, period hairdos, silk blouses, little boys talking as little English boys no longer do, and haggard battle scenes that could as well be of the First World War as the Second.
I don't side with those who think the vast scene of troops on the beach is a mere tour de force without emotion. Well, maybe it is, but it's still the most mesmerizing sequence in the movieperhaps it's involving because we don't know where it's going to go. And ultimately, pointless or not, the post-battle sequences are the closest thing we get to an objective correlative for the human tragedy the young girl has wrought. Other scenes, which can be evoked in a few lines in the novel, are so elaborately staged they overwhelm the ideas McEwan meant to evoke. We don't need to see that Underground flood. It's far more affecting just to learn what happened without seeing it. McEwan's novel isn't perfect, it's too manipulative, but it's a better story.