Atonement

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

I am not the biggest fan of period costume dramas. Even when the main characters are poor, they always seem to live in large houses, dress extravagantly, fret about their need to marry dashing young gentlemen and blah, blah, blah. As I stayed awake through last summer’s Becoming Jane only by bashing my head against my seat repeatedly, I feared that Atonement, the poster of which featured the improbably smoking-hot duo of Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, would be even worse.

The clincher: last summer my mom, whose opinion I trust, read the Ian McEwan novel and found it to be an utter drag.

But then, predictably, it went ahead and got itself nominated for Best Picture, and being a bit of an obsessive Oscar completist, I gritted my teeth and went to see it.

My feelings were mixed. The story follows young Briony (Saoirse Ronan, pronounced SEAR-shah), who on one hot day in 1930s England “sees something she doesn’t understand,” which leads her to tell a lie that destroys the romance (and dramatically alters the lives) of her older sister Cecilia (Knightley) and the groundskeeper of their estate, Robbie (McAvoy).

The plot progression toggles between the intimate and the epic, starting off with that one long day and subsequently following the three characters through their experiences in World War II – Briony (now played by Romola Garai) and Cecilia as nurses, Robbie as a soldier. We ultimately end with a 77-year old Briony (Vanessa Redgrave), who it turns out is still trying to atone for that one, massive, lie.

If you don’t know about the lie she tells, I’m not about to tell you, but when it happens, you’ll either despise her to the point where anger overtakes enjoyment, or you’ll roll your eyes at the fantastically contrived way the story leads up to her telling it. It takes a good fifty minutes, just short of an hour, to tell the story of that one day, and it’s filled with an overload of very carefully constructed plot points that just perfectly guide Briony to making precisely the wrong assumptions. Then, conveniently, she’s given the perfect circumstances to tell the dramatically damaging lie. It’s constructed so tightly that it passes beyond the point of possibility to an almost absurd degree.

Making matters worse is that the setting which surrounds this way-too-obvious build-up is pretty much everything I hate about period costume dramas: rich people lounging around, whining.

In other words, except for one scene – a conversation between a houseguest (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Briony’s cousin Lola (Juno Temple) with terrifically creepy, subtext-laden dialogue – I was all too happy to hate the first fifty minutes of Atonement.

The rest of the movie, I’m only slightly chagrined to admit, is a good deal better. It remains a frustrating and flawed experience, but it moves out of the stifling estate and morphs into a well-done World War II saga, taking ...