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MALADAPTED Atonement starts at a great English country house on a hot summer day before the Second World War. It tells of the attraction between two young Cambridge graduates, Cecily Tallis (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy). Despite their shared educational background, Cecily is upper class (her family owns the great house) and Robbie is the son of one of the family’s servants, and out of this disparity comes a remarkable and rather tragic story in the novel by Ian McEwan which Joe Wright—who directed Ms. Knightley in Pride and Prejudice—working this time from a screenplay by the skillful Christopher Hampton, has made into an impressive movie.
As Henry Green wrote, "Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations ... Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone .."
I don’t side with those who think the vast scene of troops on the beach is a mere tour de force without emotion. Well, maybe it is, but it’s still the most mesmerizing sequence in the movie—perhaps it’s involving because we don’t know where it’s going to go. And ultimately, pointless or not, the post-battle sequences are the closest thing we get to an objective correlative for the human tragedy the young girl has wrought. Other scenes, which can be evoked in a few lines in the novel, are so elaborately staged they overwhelm the ideas McEwan meant to evoke. We don’t need to see that flood in the London Underground. It’s far more affecting just to learn what happened without seeing it. I don't say that McEwan's novel is perfect either—it feels manipulative—but the shadow of it that lies hidden beyond the grand facade of the movie forms a better story.
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by
Chris Knipp
The
trouble with a movie that's a literary adaptation is that
you may have read the book, especially when the book is as
good as Atonement. Ian McEwan may not be a great
writer but he’s certainly a very good one. He writes
delicious, intelligent sentences and with them tells surprising,
quietly bold tales. The best film adaptation of a McEwan novel
is Andrew Birkin's The Cement Garden—a haunting
and strange movie that touches on one of the most ancient
of taboos, but as a story simple in its basic elements. Atonement
is many-leveled and far grander and more emotionally fraught,
encompassing as it does the decline of a ruling class and
a great war and themes of sex and love and class and the danger
of ignorance and the capacity of literature to redeem a life—or
not. Filming this novel is an ambitious task.
It's
a particularly dangerous novel to film because it’s
so easy to make the details overblown and lose the essence
of the thing. This is what Joe Wright has done. He’s
still produced a beautiful, occasionally engaging and involving
(but sometimes fatiguing) movie, replete with moments of shock
and sorrow and grandeur. But the book wasn’t about wounded
troops massed on the beach or an Underground tunnel being
flooded—though these are among the more memorable images
of the film. McEwan's Atonement really isn't about
the grandeur of pre-War upper class English country life—whose
details are just sketched in deftly by the novelist while
he focuses on the emotions, the suspicions, the doubts, the
passions. Nor, as one reads McEwan's novel, does one hear
in one’s mind the sound of a large string orchestra
playing with the incessant overlay of a loudly clacking typewriter.
But in the film one never gets away from that. This is one
of the reasons that good novels about or from any period are
timeless: the period trappings don't overwhelm, because we
don't have to see them. And heard melodies are sweet, but
those unheard are sweeter.
Atonement,
the novel, is about the mistake of a naïve, willful,
dangerously over-imaginative girl that plays into the class
prejudices of a great English family and ruins several lives.
These are events that at various points you really cannot
stage at all. They’re things you have to tell about—or
rather, hint at, and make the audience think about. Where
the book is delicate, yet disturbing, tears from the stone—the
movie is much more operatic, and not always opera of the highest
order. It may be Merchant-Ivory or Masterpiece Theater, but
it’s not Brideshead Revisited. As Beresford-Howe
said in Film Threat, “Imagine if the team that made
The English Patient tried to make the same kind of
movie, with even more brave-lads-fighting- the-Jerries porn
and this time with Extra Added English country manor porn,
and without really good actors, and this movie is what you’d
have.”
This
is the sad truth. One wants to like Knightley and McAvoy and
they’ve been excellent in other roles, but they aren’t
quite up to their jobs this time, and neither are the two
young women who play the younger sister Briony, Saoirse Roman
as the eleven-year-old girl who makes the false accusations,
and Romola Garai as the repentant eighteen-year-old. Briony
is central. She needs to be infuriating, yet sympathetic—which
isn't so easy, and neither actress quite has those qualities.
There is a great actress at the end in Vanessa Redgrave, with
her immense authority and wisdom, as the aged, soon-to-die
Briony, who appears in one speech to a TV interviewer about
her latest, and last novel, which is called Atonement. But
this is just last-minute exposition and since the message
is one of failure and quiet despair, it’s not the grand
finale the elaborately staged scenes have led one to expect.
Too much of the movie’s time is thrown away on great
paneled hallways and country house lawns, bright lipstick,
period hairdos, silk blouses, little boys talking as little
English boys no longer do, and haggard battle scenes that
could as well be of the First World War as the Second.