The decadent fag-end of Briitish cinema

Rating: 3/10 (6 August 2008)

Atonement is a sort of compilation of all the besetting sins of British cinema: the obsession with class and sexual repression, the endless retreat to the past, the fetishistic recreation of "period" detail.
The story, such as it is, is about an intense interaction between just three characters. But these lives all but disappear against the backgrounds of teeming London streets, country house vistas and the chaos of Dunkirk. This last scene is both the film's best and worst moment. A triumph in cinematic terms it adds little or nothing to the story and in retrospect is made to look even more of an overblown gesture. Every scene in this movie appears to be aimed at an awards jury--the ordinary viewer can't help feeling a little left out.
The initial conceit of the story--a confused adolescent misinterprets the actions of two adults and ruins their lives--isn't really worked through. Instead the action is driven by a chain of melodramatic and increasingly unlikely coincidences and chance discoveries. Bryony's "atonement", when it comes, is at first overdue and inadequate, and ultimately vastly overdue and incredibly inadequate. Her final reduction of everyone, including herself, to mere characters to be manipulated forms a heartless coda to a heartless film.
McAvoy is his usual superb self, but his foil is today's porcelain clothes horse of choice Kiera Knightley, a sort of stretch limo to Helena Bonham Carter's Mini Cooper. Here she who displays her complete acting range, which basically consists of narrow eyes (icy-but-indifferent) and wide eyes (loyal-and-loving). Ultimately Knightley is a metaphor for the whole film: lovely to look at, well put together but devoid of any meaning.