Cliché-ridden and emotionally inauthentic

Rating: 4/10 (4 January 2008)

I'm likely the worst person to write a review of this type of movie. Films about the upper class British set in the Victorian era, the pre-WWI period, or between WWI and WWII have always bored me to sleep. Emotions get reduced to clichéd glances and facial twitches. The same holds true for Atonement, but there's the cliché of young love interrupted laid on top of all that. Since the older sister's beau had been at Cambridge for four years, and she'd kept her distance until their last summer together, any love they had was largely a fantasy about the ideals of love. Knowing the low percentage of young love that survives, I didn't believe that a woman in her early 20's in the late 1930's would carry a torch for five years while separated from her similarly-aged lover. Conversely, I couldn't believe that she didn't beat her sister within an inch of her life to make her recant her false testimony.
Even if I had believed it, there wasn't enough character development to make me care. If the movie had covered the fracturing of the family as the result of the elder sister's estrangement, then death, or if it had covered the wrongly-convicted young man's time in prison, then there would be the basis for investing myself in the fate of the two young lovebirds. But just seeing them pine in their minds for each other, holding on to the ideal of their lover to sustain them thousands of miles apart, didn't move me.
The so-called "atonement" of the younger sister rang false, striking me as a selfish, public catharsis rather than a true repentance. In fact, in modern parlance, the younger sister displayed traits of a borderline personality, not caring about the impact her actions have on others. Nearly drowning herself at the edge of a waterfall to see if the object of her crush would rescue her, without considering his safety, is not the sign of a caring child. She was old enough and smart enough to realize that her false testimony would wrongly send a man to jail, but she didn't recant. Her storytelling couldn't possibly heal any wounds at the late date she wrote it, and her life as a writer did nothing to make up for her self-serving actions as a young girl. I doubt such a person could realize that there was anything she did that required atonement.
Further adding to the clichés is the score. I dislike movie music that overtly tries to tell me what to feel at any given moment, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the typewriter and surging strings at key moments were intrusively obvious.