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Atonement (2007)

Director: Joe Wright

Time Out rating

Average user rating

103 reviews

Synopsis

Adapted from Ian McEwan's prizewinning novel, Atonement opens in 1935 on a British country estate, where Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and hersister Briony (Saoirse Ronan, and later Romola Garai) live along with Bobbie Turner (James McAvoy), a servant’s son. After witnessing somethingshe doesn't understand, Briony makes some unfounded accusations; the fallout from those charges extends through WWII and beyond.

Movie review

From Time Out London

The first hour of ‘Atonement’ is an electric experience, during which one feels that Joe Wright (‘Pride and Prejudice’), the film’s young director, and Christopher Hampton, its screenwriter, have a clever grip on the potential of Ian McEwan’s novel to inspire more than just a well-crafted adaptation and a lyrical, intelligent film in its own right. McEwan’s book is about the telling of stories, about the perception of others’ tales and about delivering a lie to a rapt, conditioned audience for reasons of self-preservation: a key character even pleads to be believed with the defence that she saw something happening, ‘With my own eyes’. What greater appeal is there to the potential ability of cinema to twist, mould and convince us?

Wright tightly harnesses these ideas in the first, and longest, of the film’s three chapters. We’re in a smart country house in the late 1930s, just a few years before the war. Cecilia (Keira Knightley) has recently come down from Cambridge; Robbie (James McAvoy), her university contemporary and son of her parents’ housekeeper is dabbling with landscape gardening; and her brother Leon (Patrick Kennedy) is coming to dinner with a friend, the arrogant industrialist Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch). The performances are enjoyable and spot-on: Cecilia’s brittle beauty; Robbie’s educated but tempered confidence; the wily camaraderie between Leon and Marshall.

There’s clearly an attraction between Robbie and Cecilia, yet his connection with the servile classes and her inherited snobbery is holding Cecilia at bay. The class divide persists when Cecilia’s sensible 13-year-old sister, Briony (a terrific turn from Saoirse Ronan) – already dabbling in writing and staging plays at home – constructs her own, deluded fiction around the goings-on between Robbie and Cecilia that see Robbie falsely branded a ‘sex maniac’ and rapist. As with the coming of war to Brideshead, the spell is broken, the Second World War begins and Briony, later as a young adult (Romola Garai) and, much later, as a dying novelist (Vanessa Redgrave) recalls the errors of her youth.

Far from ‘unfilmable’, as some have described it, McEwan’s book offers real opportunities for a filmmaker to thread the perils of storytelling into an epic narrative that bursts out of the attractive claustrophobia of a rarefied world and onto the ravaged, classless beaches of Dunkirk and the fortified streets of London as Cecilia and Briony both, separately, work as nurses during the war and try to deal with their recent past. For the country-house scenes, Wright wisely makes us complicit with Briony’s perception of events, yet such is the strength of the director’s tactics in this chapter – repeated scenes, messing with time, the sound of a typewriter doing its damage on the soundtrack – that when he loosens his approach for a more traditional telling of the narrative for the rest of the film, one can’t help but be disappointed.

Compared to these earlier episodes, the film’s later scenes are more pedestrian and Wright becomes more prone to visual swaggery: a technically impressive but artistically questionable five-minute tracking shot of the carnage at Dunkirk; the nurses marching in formation around a hospital as lights go off above them one-by-one; the rush of water through a tube station as a character drowns – all these grate as one feels that Wright, rather than tackling the pitfalls of storytelling instead succumbs to its audience-pleasing thrills.

A noble, well-made, superbly performed and photographed (by Seamus McGarvey) semi-failure then, but still one that shows Wright to be one of the more imaginative filmmakers of his generation, capable of winning over large audiences with daring endeavours.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2007-09-04 11:19:04

Time Out London Issue 1933: September 5-11 2007

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User reviews of this film

James said...

Posted on Sep 30 2007 16:30 About to go and see this film with my girlfriend. Shoot me now! Stephen C tells me these people dont understand attonement. I say he doesnt understand attonement. Attonement is having to go and see this rubbish because of some minor indescretion commited so long ago with a bottle of whiskey and an ex-girlfriends sister. This is definately a girls film as my auto-excuse membrane is already twitching. Headache, fever, studying, great uncles death, washing my hai...........

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Jack Pollack said...

Posted on Sep 28 2007 16:12 I'm one who felt that the book could never succeed as a filml, primarily, I felt, because i questioned the motivation for devoting one's life to service as an 'atonement' for a wrong committed. i didn't hink that folks acted like that. BUT...the horror of the consequences of the big lie were so graphic on screen that I am convinced that this kind of atonement is possible. In essence someone gives up her life to atone for a lie. Do people really do that?
I did think the acting was superior, but the passion of the love was not convincing. KK is, I'm afraid, a bit wooden, and as a virile young male, I'm afraid I wouldn't be tempted to bed the young lady.

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May said...

Posted on Sep 28 2007 15:22 The beautiful stately home used in the film is Stokesey Court, near Craven Arms, Shropshire. I recognised some of the lovely countryside as I lived there some time ago.

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JONNIE said...

Posted on Sep 26 2007 15:27 It's not a blokes film
not my kind of thing at all
although keira is well fit

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LYNDSEY said...

Posted on Sep 26 2007 15:26 FILM WAS FANTASTIC.DEFINATELY A MUST SEE BY ALL...NOT JUST A CHICK FLICK!!!

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Caz said...

Posted on Sep 26 2007 11:42 Really loved the movie - was a bit unsure at the beginning but soon slipped into the feel of the tale. A must see for all

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Cecile said...

Posted on Sep 26 2007 09:08 A brilliant film !! Has there ever been a film about the commandment that says. "You should not bear false witness" then this is it. Sister against sister but how many people in their lives inhibit true love and stop others through jealously and wanting someone for themselves.
Extremely enjoyable film but at the end Bryony wishes for Atonement but fiction and wishful thinking can not change fact. Best filem I have seen this year.

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Ramez said...

Posted on Sep 26 2007 06:20 It's definitely a girly movie... but I didn't like at all!! I won't say it's crap, but I would definitely not see it again. I liked however the way the movie ended, otherwise I would describe it as tooo sad & sometimes boring...

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Stephen C said...

Posted on Sep 25 2007 17:26 It has to be one of the great ironies that nobody commenting on this film understands what is meant by atonement. Has nobody ever found themselves accused of something they had not done because of lies told by someone else? How can Briony EVER atone for the consequences of her lie? Her actions destroy a love that had only minutes before been acknowledged, and the reason the ending seems so inadequate to many reviewers is exactly the point - even at the end Briony turns her guilt into fiction rather than write the truth.
The so-called boring Dunkirk sequence is widely seen as dragging out the story, but Robbie's walk to the beach is noble as he is slowly dying of septicaemia from a wound, and whilst his motivation may be to get back to Cecilia, his comrades consider him selfless is saving them. This may be contrasted with the selfishness of Briony in never telling the truth till she herself is dying sixty years later. Nothing Briony does can ever be seen as real atonement.

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John Box said...

Posted on Sep 24 2007 17:45 Am I an outsider loser or is this film just pretentious crap? The film makers have missed any emotinal connection with the characters and as a result I just didn't care. They have sterilised the book.

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dantheman said...

Posted on Sep 23 2007 20:18 absolutely the worst film i have ever seen. appaling.

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E Dashwood said...

Posted on Sep 23 2007 15:54 A thought provoking and classic tale. Making the ordinary folk of WW2 more real for me than before. I loved the suspence and the way the story moves about before the dramatic climax of the separation. After that I loved the twists and turns and moved with the characters to the sombre finale.
I'm going again to see more. Might even read the book too.

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Lyn said...

Posted on Sep 22 2007 13:45 I saw it, and loved it. I hadn't read the book, I didn't really know what it would be about. It moved me to tears and i would definitely watch it again. Please, does anyone know which beautiful house was used as the family home?

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Head of English said...

Posted on Sep 20 2007 20:30 I loved the novel (Ian McEwan, in my opinion, is the best living novelist writing in English) and in general don't go to see film or play-adaptations of novels. However, I made this the exception as I know Redcar and visited the set of the Dunkirk scene while the film was in the making. I thought it was a very honourable adaptation and a superb film in its own right, though I found the representation of Dunkirk rather overblown - my credulity was strained. There'll surely be some Oscar nominations for the acting, screenplay, directing and cinemaphotography.

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Francie said...

Posted on Sep 20 2007 20:03 The film is beautifully shot, James M is gorgeous but apart from that a bit boring and didn't think sexual tension was very convincing in it between the two main characters...nice try but didn't quite work I don't think.

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