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Movie review: “Atonement”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
Ian McEwan’s best-selling novel “Atonement,” now turned to turgid cinema by director Joe Wright, deserved the Masterpiece Theatre treatment—lengthy probing of the psyches and behaviors of a trio of passionate people who step into fate’s stream and are carried into the deep waters of tragedy.
More accurately, two of the story’s characters are pushed into the waters. A young girl of sensitive illusions on the cusp of full-blown adolescence indulges a streak of bad seed mischief when she picks up on things she knows not of.
Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is a 13-year-old budding writer with an imagination devoid of comprehension of the complexities of eroticism and love. With class prejudice, jealousy and ignorant priggishness in the mix, Briony is the catalyst for a life-shattering event: she accuses her sister (Keira Knightley) Cecilia’s lover of molesting a young female cousin. Robbie (James McAvoy), son of the family cook at the majestic estate of the Tallis family has longed for Cecilia from afar.
When Briony sees Cecilia and Robbie locked in torrid embrace, her shock, fright and fury make her see something she didn’t see. Although Cecilia mentions to the investigating authorities that her sister is “rather fanciful,” the dye is cast. Robbie is convicted and imprisoned.
His only consolation—Cecilia’s devotion that he can feel even through prison walls and into the killing fields of France deep into the struggle of another world war. Conscription into the ranks has freed Robbie from his cell. But, reunion with Cecilia seems a distant dream. Clutching hallucinatory hope, Robbie finds himself waiting for evacuation at Dunkirk.
Meanwhile, the older and wiser Briony (Romola Garai) has become a hospital nurse, and searches each wounded soldier’s face for recognition of Robbie. Finally understanding the magnitude of the injury to Cecilia and Robbie and feeling a need to put the experience in writing, she finds that it is beyond words. More than easing her conscience, this is a wrong she knows needs more than mere accounting.
Confession and a plea for forgiveness of Cecilia and Robbie are the ultimate atonement. Or, is it too late for amazing grace? The gauzy, heavy breathing first half of the story nearly scuttles the brilliant way in which Wright later depicts the purgatory in which the characters are trapped after being forced out of their shelter of illusion and into the open to suffer the mortal wounds of the world’s realities.
Focus Films release, rated R for sexuality, language, violence.
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