Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

[Svevan]

I completely disagree with Seitz's reading of the film's ending, and I see little difference between his presentation of the book's finale and the movie's. I, and those I saw it with, felt that the final confession was not absolution; she had not achieved atonement through her words, and the deaths of all three characters was, as Seitz put it, the noose that hung her. There's a line in the film where Redgrave says she caused three people to be miserable, and the film's focus at that moment is on what could have been, which is this image of the two lovers together on the beach. Does fiction or art really offer redress? I think the movie sums that up with a big NO.

I think Seitz's dismissal has to do with the difficulty of imbuing narrative meaning into images and sounds instead of words: Wright has to communicate Briony's failure through Vanessa Redgrave's face, and he follows this close-up image with that shot on the beach that is impossible and unearned. I think the problem here has more to do with the reader than the text, because though Redgrave's performance is sincere, the truth is that she is not forgiven and she cannot undo her actions. The very act of including this coda and undoing the fictional scene in Cecilia's apartment makes the ending bitter.

[Michael]

Actually, The English Patient and the Spiderman movies are pretty similar to me: bloated, overlong, self-important, with listless characters and too-loud music. The slight difference in their literary origins is neither here nor there.

Atonement is none of those. It's amazingly lean and quiet - all in a wonderful way. Because I totally love the book (read it three times), I was hesitant about seeing the film at first. I thought there was no way the ending of the book could be interpreted cinematically but Joe Wright did the best he could to make it work. It's a very beautiful looking film - lovingly subtle in every way. Nothing like the bloated English Patient which I found embarrassingly messy and awkward. Joe Wright may not make original or groundbreaking films but Pride and Prejudice and Atonement both are very exquisitely directed and realized especially for the stories that are so impossibly literary. They sweep through with such grace and beauty - summer daydreamingly at its best.

[Marcel Gioberti]

Yeah, I generally gag when it comes to the BBC-inspired English countryside revelry, but I thought Atonement, despite its aforementioned life in the glades embellishments, was a work of genius.

I absolutely loathed Pride & Prejudice. I wanted to strangle Knightley in particular, but she was up to the task in Atonement and James McAvoy was brilliant.

Despite the production value, performance, and the thoroughly interesting story, it was the editing that won me over. I was just blown away a few times. Atonement was almost perfectly assembled. Any other cut of this film might have made the flaws difficult to stomach. Instead, I've seen it twice now, and rate it near the top of the list of 2007.

One thing I have to add, a major complaint:

Spoiler

They could have handled the very ending so much better. Seeing Cecilia and Robbie dancing around on the beach in the sand while the tide comes in over their feet was much too cheap dimestore romance novel. In the penultimate scene of the film, Redgrave knocks our socks off and makes us cry. Everything that follows just cheapened the fuck out of it, especially when Robbie looks off with a Velveeta smile into the distance and the camera lingers before cutting to black. I was reminded of nearly everything that went disastrously in Pride & Prejudice.

[Grand Illusion]

Watching this film was an interesting experience. The beginning captivated me, they lost me during the war, then the scene with

Spoiler

all three of the principals in the room, with McAvoy giving Ronan the cold shoulder

was one of the best acted of the year.

I felt the end pulled a few punches.

Spoiler

It would've been better to just have the old Briony desperately grasping for redemption using the only tools she knows how. The typewriter.

Perhaps intercutting with the empty apartment room or scenes of the devastation she caused as she's delivering the monologue would have been more truthful and made us think more what is the true worth of atonement. It would've been more powerful to provide counterpoint to Redgrave's extremely persuasive argument that she isn't rewriting history out of retreat or cowardice.

[kieslowski_67]

The first half was a masterpiece, the war scenes totally lost me, and then the movie somehow found "atonement" thanks to the 8 min scene by the great Redgrave.

James McAvoy was f*cking brilliant and hot in this.

[Noir of the Night]

I’m kind of ashamed now, but I can’t imagine I’m the only person who preemptively dismissed Atonement with the “English Patient” excuse (and as a side note, is the movie actually good? It seems to me that every time I hear about it it’s not that The English Patient itself was bad, it’s that The English Patient wasn’t as good as Fargo. But I digress.) It seems to me that that film started a turning of the tides (or maybe it was already there, who knows). Now there’s a certain aura around adaptations of prestigious Brit lit, an expectation for sophistication and poise at the expense of raw humanity.
So then, I have to say it was quite a surprise to me that Atonement, an extraordinary achievement, is actually something of an anti-Romantic Epic. The plot, by now, is probably familiar to most, if not all of you. Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a 13-year-old girl with literary aspirations, misinterprets the nature of the relationship between her older sister (Keira Knightley), and a servant’s son (James McAvoy), and, fueled by her own hormonal desires and insecurity, tells a lie that reverberates through the years and destroys all three of these lives.
It’s a powerful story, well told, but I’d like to focus on Joe Wright’s directing and, in a minute, the ending. My friend Sky Hirschkron express surprised at the neurotic style of Wright’s directing on this project, and I tend to think that’s what gives this film its immediacy. A lot of historical films fall into the trap of regarding their subjects as beautiful artifacts, be they people or battles or objects, etc. Wright is completely engaged with his characters. It’s probably why the first third of the film, the part where the things are misunderstood and the lies told, is also the most alive. The country estate vibrates with psychosexual energy and social tension. A large part of this is Saoirse Ronan. Knightley and McAvoy are very good, but Ronan is fascinating in a way I’m not sure has to do with her performance. Her piercing blue eyes, the mole on her cheek, the spindly arms and legs that evoke a praying mantis; young Briony is a completely captivating character, and the most involving parts of the film are those that focus on her.
By contrast, the Dunkirk scenes are disconnected and dreamlike. Some might call them plotless, but it makes sense. By all conventional logic, Cecilia and Robbie should have gotten married and had children and Briony finds success as a playwright and everyone is happy etc. etc. etc. It’s how these things are expected to work out. But the expected way was destroyed when Briony tells her lie, so it follows that the plot only drives the movie up through the fateful mistruth, and then becomes looser and more episodic. Even the shores of Dunkirk are presented with a detached eye. Here, as established by that extraordinary unbroken shot every review about the film has already mentioned, war is established as a grotesque carnival of both the horrific and the mundane.

SPOILERS:

Spoiler

And then, of course, we have the ending. The thing about the film that’s so brilliant is its restless, peering intelligence; it deconstructs itself as it goes along. At the end of the film, the older Briony says “So, my sister and Robbie were never able to have the time together they both so longed for... and deserved…But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life.” But the final shots of Robbie and Cecilia in romantic bliss (in front of that postcard house, to boot) aren’t satisfying, they’re sad and ludicrous. In a sense, McEwan and Wright call the bluff of countless mediocre period romances. As a film, it works in a specific way. A bevy of potential clichés are trotted out—the couple separated by adversity, war, betrayal, a bitter rivalry, etc.—and then the ending has us question the value of every single one of them. Even beyond Briony’s fictionalization of her story’s conclusion, we’re invited to consider even McEwan’s and Wright’s fictionalization of this entire story, and to ask ourselves which kind of truth is more important, the emotional or the factual. Most fiction would suggest the former, but Atonement challenges this assumption. It’s not another The English Patient. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, it asks the questions most costume dramas wouldn’t dare thinking about.

[noelbotevera]

Not a big fan. Thought the lovemaking scene was too snipped up to avoid showing us a Knightly nipple; thought some of the sequences (the wedding, for one) just screamed 'fantasy!' out so loud you can tell it's a figment of Briony's imagination. Thought the ending--with Vanessa Redgrave in gigantic closeup--so pleading and sentimental there's not much ambiguity about where the filmmaker's sympathy lies.

[colinr0380]

Spoilers:

I'm sort of in the middle but lean towards liking the film quite a bit - Atonement is definitely not as unwieldy as The English Patient (I feel in Minghella comparison terms it actually comes closer to The Talented Mr Ripley, though just falls short of being as great as that film!) but I did find some of the early scenes a little overplayed, such as the previously mentioned chocolate scene (for goodness sake, the guy even has the villanous Dick Dastardly moustache!). I find it easier to forgive the later scenes after the house section as being pure creations of Briony but (strangely like Paprika) it feels that the rules of the reality of the situation need to be set down before everything becomes crazy and subjective because otherwise the audience will not know what is exactly being threatened by the upheavals in the film, or even that we should treat the upheavals as being so massive for the characters! However I say that from the perspective of Briony's 'book' beginning from the end of the house - thinking about it again it seems more likely that all the early scenes are from Briony's book as well and that what seemed like an omniscient stepping out of Briony's viewpoint to see what 'really' happened is more likely to be just the older Briony's new interpretation of what she had previously misinterpreted. So we do not get any chance to step away from Briony's point of view at all, even though we get scenes to suggest we do take a more objective view.

I find it a wonderful joke that the DVD has been advertised here as a perfect gift for Valentine's day! I agree with the above comment that it seems an anti-romance, one in which the romantic lead characters remain only cyphers with any insight that is offered into them being only superficial. I really liked the way that the main issue becomes one of whether cannibalisation of life for creativity is acceptable. Is the death of a couple of people the price worth paying in order to kickstart your writing career? I find the war material in the film fascinating as it feels it is there both for the spectacle (of Briony falling into the writer's trap of getting too involved in researching her subject and piling in masses of detail about Robbie's environment to perhaps distract from the way she has very little to say about Robbie himself. The technically impressive but emotionally shallow virtuoso tracking shot seems a perfect filmic expression of this), but one of the other points it is making is comparing Briony's sacrifice of Cecilia and Robbie to her overactive imagination to the way deaths in war are considered justifiable in order to achieve a greater goal. That the setting is the retreat from Dunkirk adds an even greater sense of lives being wasted for no real gain as the most romantic war of the 20th century is stripped of the romanticism of making a great sacrifice and being cut down while storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day etc.

Then there is the question of whether a literary happy ending is better than a realistic, downbeat one? Does giving those you wronged a happy ending in your novel absolve you of the guilt you feel or are you just deluding yourself? (Could Briony have been aware of this and wrote her novel more as a cautionary tale than as an attempt at purging herself of the guilt she lived with the rest of her life?)

By the way I love a moment in the scene when Robbie, Cecilia and Briony are having their, later revealed to be fictional, meeting in Cecilia's flat. Briony's writing of the scene has Robbie, after lambasting Briony for her class-based accusation of him, immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was the footman and not Paul who had attacked the girl and Briony has to put him straight by telling him about seeing the wedding. I thought that was a beautifully subtle way of showing an attempt by Briony the writer to 'atone' by giving Robbie some of the same class based prejudices as she held - as if that somehow mitigated her own mistaken accusation. There are a lot of moments of Briony's revisionism as she softens, manipulates and projects onto the other characters throughout the film - one of the nice things is that it depends on the viewer how much blame they place on Briony, on whether they let her off the hook. Some may feel that just retelling their story and keeping Cecilia and Robbie's memory known is enough to save Briony - I personally feel that the small revisions throughout the story are just as bad as her accusation itself was, and in some ways are worse as they show that Briony can't help herself, she is a slave to her point of view because to step outside of that may reveal something she will never be able to live with.

I also get the strange feeling that maybe the guilt was all in her head (or at least her interpretation of her guilt) because she had no more contact with Cecilia and Robbie after that fateful night. Would it not be in some ways better for her if she had destroyed a great love? - it gives her wrongful deed and subsequent atonement a more mythical dimension (and it most likely helps book sales that she has a World War Two setting for her tragic story! )

The great unspoken tragedy in the film could be that Briony destroyed lives through misunderstanding the actions of two people who were 'in lust' rather than 'in love'. I find that more of a devastating waste somehow as it completely undermines the grand tragedy of Robbie and Cecilia's tryst. That seems to be a delusion on Briony's part on a par with the happy ending.

I feel this would make a fantastic second half of a double bill with Heavenly Creatures. The fictional Atonement seems to answer the question I was left with at the end of Peter Jackson's true story - "What impact did the event have on your writing and would you give it all up to go back and change things?"

I feel the difference is that in Heavenly Creatures you get the sense that if there was a chance for the two girls to be together they would have done so; in Atonement I think if Briony was given the choice she would keep her guilty conscience to keep writing.

[domino harvey]

Universal Home Video has announced Atonement which stars James McAvoy, and Keira Knightley. The Joe Wright directed drama will be available to own from the 18th March, and should retail at around $29.98. The film itself will be presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, along with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track. Extras will include a commentary with Director Joe Wright, deleted scenes with commentary by Director Joe Wright, a Making of Atonement featurette, and a Novel to the Screen featurette. A HD DVD/DVD Combo release will also be available for $39.98 with identical features.

[Marcel Gioberti]

Well, I finally bit on an HD-DVD player so I can't wait!

This will fast become a beloved film in my collection.

[colinr0380]

Listening to the commentary last night Joe Wright

Spoiler

praises the need for happy endings.

I'm not sure whether that means he was unaware of alternative interpretations (though that is unlikely, especially as he says McEwan grilled him thoroughly on how he was going to adapt the book!) or whether he was just giving the feel good interpretation of the story and letting the audience wrestle with the darker questions themselves (he does say at a couple of points that he needed to treat passages elliptically because they "raised too many questions"). So it might be best to see my interpretation of the film as just being the point of view of a bitter and cynical person!

EDIT: I feel more secure now that I've seen the 'making of' and they briefly tackle the idea of Briony's 'creative writing'!

[colinr0380]

DVD Beaver review. I was interested to note that the US disc has the original, non-removable subtitles for the French dialogue - the UK disc has player generated ones instead.

I'm more of a fan of keeping the original subtitles where possible but on the other hand you get the 'clean' version of the scene on the UK disc, so it all comes down to preference. I feel the original theatrical subtitles in a predominantly English language film with short dialogue scenes in different languages or location titles (for example those in Traffic or The Silence of the Lambs) are usually created in styles or fonts that are considered part of the aesthetic of the film and add mood. The generic player generated subtitles lose some of that extra visual interest.

Of course it is different to those subtitles that are added to a film to aid an audience unfamiliar with the language - those should most definitely be removable.

[domino harvey]

Just saw this and it was terrific, and as it was the last Best Pic nom I needed to see, I think I can now officially declare this past year's Oscars the best Best Pic nominations in decades, where four truly worthy films (with an average but harmless fifth being Juno) went to bat. I had heard good things even though it's Oscar-noms were considered something of a joke by industry types, but I had no idea that the film was about what it was about:

The impossibility of reconciling grief and the ability or lack thereof to transfer wish-fulfillment in one's life to one's writing. This is such a "writer's movie," I enjoyed it immensely and agree that the ending isn't "happy," but doubly sadder than if it had ended with Redgrave. The happiness we're seeing is completely manufactured and driven by the underlying sorrow that it never existed.

[noelbotevera]

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

[Antoine Doinel]

The first half was a masterpiece, the war scenes totally lost me, and then the movie somehow found "atonement" thanks to the 8 min scene by the great Redgrave.

Saw this tonight, and pretty much agree, though with some minor adjustments. You can put me in the camp of haters of the Dunkirk shot. Yes, it was magnificently composed, but it was also a completely flashy camera trick in a film that otherwise was so subtly, and magnificently directed that it was a complete and total distraction. The "narrative purpose" it served could've been handled in a few shorter scenes and achieved the same "impact". The scene that is revealed not to have happened later doesn't benefit from Wright twirling the camera around for five minutes. It really felt like it was composed for a WWII film Wright has always wanted to do, but figured this was his chance to throw it in. I also felt the subsequent fifteen or twenty minutes of war stuff was awkwardly fitted into the narrative and really felt like the screenwriter had difficulty on how to adapt it to the screen.

That side, once that stuff was disposed of, the film got back its steam and really ended strongly. I'll need some time to think of the end, though I can't help but think the final shots of the happy couple was something to appease audiences. I don't buy the argument it's even more sad because it didn't happen. That impact hit me already in the confession sequence. For me it played out like a fantasy and salve for the audience to float out of the theater with.

That said, those things didn't bother me enough to dislike the film. It has so much going for it otherwise, particularly the classical feel of the opening, the unsaid feelings of eroticism in the early portions of the film, that marks it leaps and bounds ahead of other similar films.

I was put off by the film, mostly by the trailers, for a long time but I'm very glad I finally caught up with it.

[AisleSeat]

The first half was a masterpiece, the war scenes totally lost me, and then the movie somehow found "atonement" thanks to the 8 min scene by the great Redgrave.

Please note: spoilers ahead

The war scenes, culminating with Dunkirk, give the narrative a sad ironical twist. The evacuation at Dunkirk, in which over 300,000 soldiers were rescued, was considered a tremendous strategic success, or in Winston Churchill's words, "a miracle." But it was there, where thousands of other soldiers were saved, that Robbie (McAvoy) died, a cruel turn of fate since he had striven so diligently to reach the beach, his love of Cecilia (Knightly) carrying him forward.

It was Briony's (Redgrave, as the elderly Briony) fantasy, as revealed in her book, that Robbie survived Dunkirk, to once again begin anew his affair with Cecilia. Briony, to save herself from the internal moral struggle that is tearing her apart, finds relief in penning fictional stories, as she once did in childhood. At long last she reaches a point of expiation by writing about Robbie and Cecilia, and in doing so makes an effort to confess her sins; she fails nonetheless as the story devolves into fiction. When an elderly Briony, now a noteworthy author, returns to the place of the pivotal event in her life—her monstrous lie—it is only then that she finally begin to accept what really transpired with Robbie and Cecilia, a crucial irony because her successful book is also the story of her tragedy. Will Briony find atonement? And if so, what kind, and how? While one can understand that she may accept the forgiveness of others, it is apparent she may never be at peace herself. Three lives were destroyed, she intimates, one of which is hers.

Almost every major plot turn in Atonement involves irony to some extent. Robbie wasn't saved at Dunkirk; Cecilia expired in a subway station, unusual because subways were places of refuge during the Blitz; and Briony, who felt nearly worthless that dying may have been a relief, it was she alone of the three that continued on, tormented, while, at the same time, creating fictional characters who find happiness. It's ironical, too, that the bulk of the Atonement, itself, both book and movie, is fantasy, a delusion. And that's what gives it a memorable spark.

[colinr0380]

Personally if there were no more Second World War films to be made (wishful thinking I know!), I think this would be the perfect film to end on. It is less about a wartime romance than about the whole commodification of the war era from the style of the period (by this I mean everything from the bathing suits and evening dresses to the equally fetishised and elevated in their own way nurses and soldiers uniforms) and the deeply defined class differences where everyone knows their place (but there can still be the frisson of a Lady Chatterley style fling with the hunky manservant or the sexy but seemingly out of your league young woman - the darker twist on this is that the class system can also allow certain other illicit behaviours to be covered over or shifted to other people), to the way that Second World War settings can be an easy crutch for contemporary authors (and filmmakers!) to use to graft on an extra significance to their material and to work as an easy sell to publishers or executives than without that wartime setting. (I get the sense that Briony is kind of a Catherine Cookson type of writer, taking significant periods of history and reducing them only to marketable backdrops for insipid fictional romances. In the filmic sphere I suppose the Jack and Rose relationship in James Cameron's Titanic is this kind of 'historical romance' material when it is played straight).

In a sense I agree with Antoine Doinel that the film grinds to a halt for the scene on the beach, but that is the point - it is "Second World War porn" for the audience as we spend minutes dwelling on the details of the environment and marvelling at the camera trickery that such a virtuoso shot inevitably calls attention to, much as a bad writer might get caught up in spending thirty pages meticulously detailing every aspect of the environment surrounding the characters to the detriment of the characters themselves! (In fact Robbie and Cecilia are so sketchily detailed, even in the early country house sections, that they are constantly overpowered by, and defined in relationship to, the scenery around them more than being fully rounded indviduals - something which speaks towards Briony's unreliability as storyteller)

After all there are now many more people alive now who never experienced those times firsthand for themselves yet have grown up on a constant diet of films, books and television programmes (some good and some bad) on the period all imparting a strange bittersweet nostalgia for a time they never really knew. Much like Briony herself in fact.

[aox]

The only element of this film worthy of mention IMO was the brilliant score. Terrible film in pretty much every other regard. Even the "Beach scene" felt staged, self-absorbed, tacked on, and unnecessary. Redgrave was decent (actually, the best performance of the film), but it was too late at that point. I will admit the first 30 minutes are pretty to look at, but the middle of the film is so superfluous. This didn't even need to be set in WWII, as it added nothing to the film. There was no sense of tension either because it was obvious who raped the girl from the very scene.

And if I recall, doesn't this film also shamelessly rip off the "Come back to me" line from Lean's Brief Encounter? I think the director saw the English Patient one too many times.

[Antoine Doinel]

This didn't even need to be set in WWII, as it added nothing to the film. There was no sense of tension either because it was obvious who raped the girl from the very scene.

Actually, the fact that war breaks out four years after Briony's lie makes her deed that much worse. Robbie is pretty much forced to go to the front lines where he meets his ultimate fate. Had Briony not jumped to conclusions, he would've gone and maybe even finished medical school, and would've served his country in that capacity.

As for who raped the girl, of course it was obvious. It was made pretty clear even before the twins went missing that Paul Marshall is a quasi-pedophile. The chocolate bar scene and the redhead's obvious lie about the source of the burns on her arms makes this pretty apparent. The film isn't a mystery about who raped the girl.