Atonement, the film, isn’t Atonement the novel. Maybe it was impossible to adapt the novel to the screen given the premise of the novel. It was a novel about a novel that was itself. Ian McEwan, the author of the novel, was criticized about this convolution and whether he was just being cute but one thing McEwan can’t be called is cute.

Readers of the Atonement (or any other of McEwan novel) will attest to its dense, lugubrious prose and if your vocabulary muscles are weak reading McEwan will give them suppleness. His novels are not page turners except perhaps for the dictionary one keeps close at hand.

So if one is to understand the weakness of the film it means one must understand the premise on which the novel was built and hence its film adaptation. This means that the remainder of this review will not only reveal many details of the novel’s plot but also how the director of the film, Joe Wright, was faithful to most of those details but unfaithful to the ending.

The first part of the film sets the stage carefully and deliberately. Handsomely photographed by Seamus McGarvey, the film opens in an opulent British mansion of the Tallis family just prior to World War II. Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), an aspiring writer at the tender age of thirteen, has just completed her first play and is searching for her mother to proclaim the good news. This is no idle set-up by McEwan. Briony’s talent for words and her understanding of their power will motivate her for the rest of her life.

In the search for her mother, minding a migraine in her bedroom, Briony introduces the audience to the other main characters. First, Grace Turner, a servant in the Tallis household and then her son Robbie (James McEvoy), Robbie is the link character; Briony has a crush on him and he has a crush on Briony’s older sister Cecilia Tallis, stunningly played by Keira Knightly, whose green dress draped on anorexic bones displays her magnetic attraction. Although Cecilia and Robbie have been in medical school together as peers, she is gradually separating herself from him but not for long.

Briony’s brother, Leon Tallis (Patrick Kennedy) arrives from London with a friend, Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch) for a family celebration. Other members of the family take their place on the estate and soon Briony, with a deliberate oath, will destroy not only her life but the lives of several others. So far, Director Wright has the novel perfect. I’ll omit the treacherous details. These scenes are hypnotic.

The theme of the novel and the film is not yet clear but in retrospect the essential elements are in place. Briony destroys lives with words, lying words, attested to by oaths. And an oath is words a person says to God.

This is the clue to the title of the novel and the film, Atonement. The film is not entitled Repentance or Reconciliation. Atonement, in the strict theological sense, is regarded as the act of the dying Christ to make man one (at-one) with God again. Atonement is a divine act, the act of a new creation in theological parlance. Penance, on the other hand, is an act of a sinful person in order to be reconciled to God’s good graces. There is a difference; God atones, man repents. McEwan does not choose his titles lightly. So, Briony, seeing that her words have destroyed two lives sets out not to repent, although it would be valuable for her but useless to those she destroyed, but to atone. She must become a god or the nearest thing to it—a novelist—and recreate. She will discover her vehicle is to use words, to write a novel, to create the characters she destroyed.

The pivotal scene occurs when the adult Briony (Romola Garai) is attending the war wounded in a London hospital. A French soldier is dying and Briony is enlisted to comfort him since she knows at least minimal French. In the course of the conversation her words, entirely fictitious, lies from whole cloth, give comfort and solace to the dying French soldier. She validates his past and creates for him an entirely fictional future. He dies peacefully with that future several moments later. Watch Briony walk from that scene. It is an entire transformation from her walking in the opening scene. Atonement is at hand. From that point on Briony understands that she must use words to recreate the lives she destroyed.

So, Briony writes the novel Atonement which the reader is reading and, for the film, the viewer is seeing. However, the reader and viewer only discover this at the very end of the book and the film. Thus the critique of “cute” leveled at McEwan.

The middle of the film is equally faithful to McEwan’s vision and Director Wright does so many things well. The scene at Dunkirk will become a landmark for visualizing the ravages of war. It reminded me of the scene in The Big Country where William Wyler has Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston duke it out in alternating close up and long shots.

But the problem lingers. How to film a film about a book about a book? Enter Vanessa Redgrave as an aging Briony who tries to tidy up the whole story in a long narration to a TV talk show host. Worked in the novel but doesn’t in the film, at least for me; wonder if it worked for McEwan? He’s not listed in the credits for the screenplay. The whole last bucolic scene with Robbie and Cecilia dancing around their dream house is not in the novel. What’s in the novel is a last farewell party to Briony who is dying. All the family knows the story of the lie, the short lives of Robbie and Cecilia, the writing of the novel and they have forgiven her. Not only has she repented but as best she could she has atoned. They reward her with an enactment of the first play she wrote, the one on that fateful evening. Why couldn’t the film end with that instead of pretending it was a happy romantic ending?

Regardless, the film is worth seeing. All the performances are top drawer. If it garnered honors for Oscar best film I wouldn’t be displeased but I think most of the competition is too tough.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age