Atonement - out now
On a sultry summer day in 1935 an upper-class family prepares for a dinner party at their country mansion. Precocious 13 year old Briony is looking for drama, and writes a playlet to be performed in front of the adults. When the thing falls flat she goes for a walk, and observing her elder sister Cecilia stripping off after a strange argument with Robbie, the housekeeper’s son, Briony’s fevered imagination and sexual naïveté lead her to make a dramatic false accusation which sees Robbie sent to jail. Five years later the drama moves to World War II. Briony, estranged from her sister, embarks on a nursing career in a lifelong struggle to atone for her single terrible lie which destroys the lives of a whole family. Cecilia has also become a nurse, while Robbie is a footsoldier preparing for the Dunkirk evacuation.
In this powerful and sumptuous adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) deserves praise for bringing the novel’s major themes - betrayal, redemption, sexual repression, and the unreliability of narrative - to the big screen. Wright likes to give us extended close-ups which bring the characters’ repressed emotions to the fore – Robbie’s clouded brow disguising the hurt of betrayal and discrimination; Cecilia’s jaunty visage which breaks into a warm smile when she encounters her beloved Robbie.
The first half of the film depicts well the stifling intensity of L. P. Hartley’s Go-Between and the lush beauty of Brideshead – you can almost feel your skin burning under the heat of the sun. Keira Knightly’s bored and sophisticated Cecilia conveys brilliantly the struggles of a forbidden lover in starchy pre-war England with all its snobbery and sychophancy, as she conducts an affair with the cleaner’s boy. McAvoy likewise puts in a fine performance as Robbie, though sadly the screenplay does not allow him much range. The scene in which the young Briony, played by newcomer Saoirse Ronan, falsely accuses Robbie of sexually assaulting her cousin is simply electrifying. McEwan is a master of portraying childish misunderstandings of an adult world.
The second half of the film, loses focus when Robbie is sent to prison. The apocalyptic landscape of a French beach where British soldiers are waiting to be shipped home is technically impressive and overwhelming, but cannot compare with the intricate interplay of emotion and decorum so well executed in the first half. The film’s final chapter in which a much older Briony explains how the mistakes of her past have changed the course of her life, comes across as a rather flat attempt to tie-up loose ends in the plot.
Whatever its shortcomings, Atonement deserves all the hype it has been given. The two leads give their best performances to date in what is a cinematic masterpiece.
