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Atonement
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: December 15, 2007

If you’re hankering for a bit of sumptuous tragedy this holiday season, look no further than Joe Wright’s new film Atonement. This adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel is, for an hour or so, beautiful, clever, riveting, and rather amazing, as it patiently lays the groundwork for its pivotal, plot-defining moment. Then, halfway through the movie, the director abandons all narrative self-control and starts swinging for epic fences. As a result, you may feel your heart stepping slowly and reluctantly out of Atonement’s grip. And when the lights come up, you may leave the theater haunted by what might have left you haunted, and devastated by nagging non-devastation. It is, after all, a tragic story too, and not just a tragically misspent opportunity.

In any case, Atonement gets off to a strong start. The setting is an English estate in the years just preceding World War II. A precocious, creative, and attention-ravenous young girl named Briony Tallis accidentally witnesses the most stimulating moments of her older sister’s awkward courtship by the family’s well-liked servant, Robbie. Naïve, jealous, over-imaginative, and simply upset, Briony co-mingles these incidents with a sex crime committed that same evening by another family friend, and, when questioned by the police, she punishes Robbie by accusing him of the assault. The event leaves both sisters estranged from each other and from their family. And Robbie, poor Robbie, ends up enlisting his way out of prison and lost in war-torn France as a lowly private in the retreating English army.

Joe Wright does a magical job of playing out the day that destroys Briony Tallis’ family. Each misinterpreted event is seen from both a child’s and an adult’s perspective, and without warping any of the facts, the narrative creates a sense of sexual malevolence in Briony’s experience that makes her more forgivable to the viewer than she will ever be to her atonement-seeking self. Even beyond the scenes of snooping and eavesdropping, though, the film offers some heartbreakingly exquisite images and even a typewriter-driven score to bring the young girl’s runaway imagination to life. The effect is to convincingly equip Briony with a spectacular mind, and this turns out to be crucial to the film’s crowning tragedy, as much later she becomes a prolific author who has elaborately failed to undo the facts of her life with fiction.

So far, so good—but the narrative loses all focus and momentum during the film’s second half. Notably, Robbie’s wartime experience, which amounts to a lot of lonesomeness and malnutrition, is not presented in any kind of context. The viewer is simply dropped into a “war is hell” scenario, and asked to lament the chaos onscreen. It doesn't work. Onscreen chaos is better earned—preceded first by order and then by its deterioration. Titanic and Apocalypse Now come to mind. As for Atonement, it delivers the madness but not the descent. For instance, the film’s grandest technical achievement is also its biggest transgression. Borrowing heavily from Frances Ford Coppola’s playbook, Joe Wright stages a terribly impressive tracking shot of soldiers gathered on the beach awaiting evacuation. In a single, endlessly weaving take, we see thousands of extras, occasional drunken fistfights, a Ferris wheel, various war machines and amusement park rides, the senseless execution of horses, a pommel horse, wounded men singing wartime anthems, and so on—all manner of evocative incongruity. But we didn’t get there from any recognizable kind of war, with missions and combat and comrades and commanding officers. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t say whether this surreal sequence is too loyal or not loyal enough to the source material. But I do know that it’s unfortunate, and also downright strange, to watch Atonement suddenly dispense with all narrative foreplay and urge us toward its incongruous Ferris wheel.

The film’s second half also follows Briony’s self-imposed penance as a volunteer nurse, and the scenes of her stoic and bloody undertakings are fairly standard-issue, anecdotal, and momentum-free. Add to that a few fantasy sequences—dramatizations of Briony’s re-imaginings of history with less tragic results, and the film really scatters itself before deploying its depressing final testament on the folly of the imagination.

Joe Wright’s previous film was 2005’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, and it was half-great too, stumbling laughably at first, then finding its groove with its own spectacular tracking shot, and finally finishing charming and strong. Certainly this is a talented director, capable of someday putting together a movie that works from start to finish. But with this film he comes across as more desperate for an Academy Award than anyone since Nick Nolte. And one can only wonder what Roberto Benigni-esque sprite will leap up on Oscar night to snatch it away.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld