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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

Dora said...

Posted on Sep 08 2007 21:38 'It was rubbish'
What an influential argument.
If you dont like it, say why so you arent clogging up the screen with your superfluous comments.
I really liked it, the twist was unexpected, Dunkirk bit was incredible and acting superb (partic. Saorise Ronan). Typewriters irritated me though.

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Louisa said...

Posted on Sep 08 2007 21:34 Richard H, I was overwhelmed by your influential argument. So complex!
I say, (in the words of Cecilia Tallis) "You idiot!"
At least explain why you thought it was 'rubbish' and not clog up the screen with such a superfluous comment.
I thought it was great, but the typewriter got irritaing.

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knockoff said...

Posted on Sep 08 2007 17:06 What a pointless film. It is not a war film. It is not a love film. It is not an historical drama. It is so cliched that I ceased to flinch even when they sang "White Cliffs of Dover" while our boys were trying to get off the beach ar Redcar (Oh yes...it looks like Redcar)
I am told that it faithfully reproduces the book. So read the book, its cheaper and it is more comfortable to doze off in bed rather than sleep in a cinema seat.

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Joe said...

Posted on Sep 08 2007 13:17 Atonement, the film adaptation, was absolutely stunning. I have to say it is probably the best film I have ever seen. If you look past the technical babble of critics and judge it on pure, unadulterated emotion, the film leaves you feeling bereft and lost, not from the film's inconclusiveness but from it's sheer tragedy and the beauty in it. Every actor, young and old, inexperienced and experienced, plays their part impeccably and I could not find fault with any of them. I was deeply moved and so should anyone be who sees this film and appreciates it. I urge everyone to see Atonement.

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Jenny said...

Posted on Sep 08 2007 03:38 I enjoyed this film but I wasn't thoroughly moved. However, it was sad and touching in places. I thought it was directed RIGHT WELL (lol) I liked how scenes were shown from different points of view. I also fancy James Mcavoy so I wanted to see him and her get it on more. :( I think it's easy to watch this film and it doesn't drag on that much, even though it is quite long. I thought it was also a unique story and a strange twist.

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Alison Young said...

Posted on Sep 07 2007 20:27 It's beautifully shot but rather empty. I wasn't emotionally engaged and, quite frankly, the scenes in France rather dragged. Plus, I still can't fathom why she was carrying that vase down to the fountain in the first place. I wish somebody would explain...

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CJ said...

Posted on Sep 07 2007 18:47 Absolutely amazing!!!! James is gorgeous and Keira is stunning. The body language between them was unfaultable! 10 out of 10

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John Winter said...

Posted on Sep 07 2007 15:15 I would rather watch run fat boy run on my own

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ellakatie said...

Posted on Sep 05 2007 11:55 its a beast! =] james mcavoy & keira knightley are really good init =] LAD

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Nick an Antonement Extra said...

Posted on Sep 01 2007 10:18 I finished filming as an extra in the blockbuster movie Atonement on August 22nd 2006. I didn't realise I'd have to wait a full 12 months and 1 day to see the end result on screen.
Well was it worth the wait?
The answer is yes. The movie has the meticulous detail you would expect from a director of Joe Wright's calibre.
Richard Brooks (writing in the Sunday Times) said he would be amazed if the jury finds a better film than Atonement to take first place at the Venice film festival on August 29th.
He said, "I cannot think of a better British movie in years. Unlike most of our home-grown efforts, it is big scale, yet intimate when it needs to be."
I would agree. The story unfolds and the audience is drawn into the plot from the start. It begins in pre-war England in a large country house with James McAvoy’s character (Robbie Turner) being wrongly accused of rape and being imprisoned and thus separated from Keira Knightley. He is released from prison on condition he joins the army.
This is a love story and more, with the back drop of the Second World War. Although it is not a war film as such, the scenes of the Dunkirk evacuation are some of the best of their type ever executed in cinema history.
The scene that I was waiting to see is towards the end of the film. Joe Wright shot the Dunkirk scene in Redcar in one complete take, with no edits. It looks amazing, maybe being part of it made me slightly biased, but the human tableau that McAvoy's character walks through engulfs your senses and I can’t wait to see it again. My only regret is that it wasn’t longer.
Apart from this, Atonement doesn’t disappoint in any department, the acting is first class and the story is engaging and I certainly didn’t guess the ending.
I will definitely see it again, this time at the Regent Cinema in Redcar, where the building is one of the cornerstones of the great set.
And finally did I see myself? Well possibly, the jury’s still out, until I get my hands on the DVD next year. Enjoy it.
he comment you type in this box will appear on the site

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francesca said...

Posted on Aug 30 2007 20:06 I have also seen this film at a preview gala and must say i loved it!! The way it is shot is stunning and encaptures you in that time and in their story. It is the best piece of cinamatography i have ever seen and would recomend this film to anyone. James Mcavoy is superb in this film, and opened my eyes to the sadness his character had experienced because of one little girls vivid imagination. Opens on 7th september, its a must see movie, one not to dissapoint!

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Richard Horrobin said...

Posted on Aug 30 2007 15:05 It's rubbish.

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rharris said...

Posted on Aug 20 2007 12:58 Watched this film at a special preview followed by Q + A with the Director. The audience was stunned. The film tells the story even better than the book does, but pays heed to the devices used in the book. Everything was convincing - even the 'dream sequence' Dunkirk scene - which Joe Wright states was made that way because of budget constraints: if so, those constraints did him a big favour. That scene was, for me, the best piece of cinema since Peter Greenaway's epic set days. Don't miss this film.

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