Imagination Running Wild

One lie shatters several lives in Joe Wright's stirring Atonement.

by Sam Adams

HOPELESS ROMANTICS: James McAvoy and Keira Knightley as star-crossed lovers. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

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A literary deconstruction cloaked in period filigree, Ian McEwan's Atonement basks in the syntactical elegance of classic British fiction before unstringing it like so much tinsel. Self-awareness is a harder sell on celluloid, and director Joe Wright has a tough go of it. In the movie's first half, set at an English country estate in 1935, he floods the screen with soft white light that threatens to wash out the image altogether, and its second, set five years later, contains a bravura Steadicam shot that takes in the evacuation of Dunkirk, swooping through masses of bedraggled troops strewn across the pitted beach.

Wright's version of Pride and Prejudice boasted a similar stunt shot, but while Pride's served to knit together the various factions at a society ball, Atonement's conveys little more than a sense of scale, revealing ever-greater numbers of the walking dead. It's a tour de force, but it doesn't serve the scene.

The movie begins with carnage writ small. Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is a bright, withdrawn 13-year-old who fancies herself a writer of plays and novels. She observes from a distance the movements in her family's cluttered country manse: the budding flirtation between her elder sister Celia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the servant's son her father has put through Cambridge; the return of her prodigal brother and his unctuous friend, a nascent war profiteer; her mother's migraine-induced withdrawals and occasional appearances. She watches them, like a child toying with an insect (an example of which is helpfully provided to illustrate the point), until she sees an opportunity to make her mark, and then she strikes, shattering lives with a convincing falsehood.

In the second, Briony (now played by Romola Garai) tries to make amends, foregoing university education in favor of a job as a wartime nurse. While Robbie experiences the horrors of war firsthand, she can only anticipate or intuit them. When a wounded Belgian soldier (Jérémie Renier) lands in her ward, she obligingly unwraps the bandage around his head, and looses a chunk of skull that drops moistly to his sheets.Method to the Madness
Sam Adams talks to Sam Adams talks to the makers of Atonement.

The tragic romance between Robbie and Celia gives Atonement its romantic sweep, but the movie revolves around Briony, a character who's meant to be at once eerily spiteful and oddly sympathetic. Wright treats the young Briony in standard devil-child fashion, with lots of menacing stares and an unsettling stillness. But Garai's Briony is more complex, suggesting a deep struggle combined with an unholy hollowness, as if she's fighting to give herself a soul. Wright's stylistic flourishes occasionally push the movie off the rails in these sections, particularly a hospital-bed confrontation that's backed with blood-red curtains like something out of a Mario Bava film.

Atonement ably plucks out the references to writing in McEwan's text. Practically every plot turn hinges on some note or telegram or intercepted letter, and Dario Marinelli's score is punctuated by the sound of typewriter keys, a device that is instantly maddening and becomes only more so. McEwan's subterranean theme develops into a full-blown motif, one that finds a more appropriately filmic payoff in the movie's surprise coda. Without giving too much away, I can say only that a sudden shift in perspective retroactively explains some of the film's stranger choices and even the flatness of certain characters.

Atonement is unfailingly well-acted, with stirring performances from Knightley and McAvoy (shedding their images as, respectively, swashbuckler and second banana) and a game-changer from Garai, who has languished in small parts since her striking debut in I Capture the Castle four years ago. Wright steers clear of the usual British character-actor suspects, giving the film a vitality so many of its ilk lack. In the end, Atonement is only the sum of its parts and not more than them, but the parts are so well-turned that the gaps hardly show.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Atonement

Directed by Joe Wright

A Focus Features release