Atonement
Directed by Joe Wright
Focus Features, 2008
By Eva Bowering
The film version of Atonement seems ideal for Oscar. The drama boils, it’s explicitly tragic, and on top of all that intensely romantic. It seems like your perfect Oscar staple. The cinematography is well done, and the sweeping beach sequence is quite visually stunning. Vanessa Redgrave (brief though her stint may be) manages to fully engage attention. Yet I didn’t come out of Atonement enjoying much of it at all. Directed by Pride & Prejudice’s Joe Wright, and based on the book of the same name by Ian McEwan, Atonement will probably reach a large audience, yet to me it fell short.
I’ve pondered as to why exactly I came out feeling like I could go home and easily forget this film in the next few months. It’s not as if this is one of the worst films I’ve seen, because it wholeheartedly tries its best to thrill, tantalize, and shock the audience. But I think that’s the problem. The situation is highly blown out of proportion, and thus tries to force itself onto you. I came out of the theater feeling like I had watched a two-hour-and-thirty-three-minute version of Coronation Street.
Set in the era of WWII in England, Atonement is essentially the not-as-complicated-as-it-wants-you-to-think story about the doomed relationship between Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) and Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and her younger sister Briony, who is played by three separate actresses throughout the film (Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, and lastly Vanessa Redgrave). Briony is depicted throughout three stages of her life, from the ages of 13 to 77. The story primarily focuses on Briony, due to the horrible, decisive action she makes at the age of 13 to ruin the lives of her sister Cecilia and her childhood crush Robbie when she stumbles upon their abrupt love affair. The execution of this plot, however, begged me to wonder how Briony continues to fall into these weird traps between her sister and their trusted groundskeeper. Surely, at the age of 13 you had more simplistic things to do than stalk your elder sister and her boyfriend around a gigantic mansion in so very little time. I say “so very little time” because the majority of the love affair takes place in what you assume to be a day; which seems like a ridiculous amount of time for love, intrigue, and so much more. After all of this, you fast forward to WWII to see how the three main characters are all involved, either fighting it, or nursing war-torn soldiers back to health. And so the intrigue deepens.
The greatest issue I had with regard to this film is the way in which you never really get to know these characters outside of the horrible things that happen to them. You spend the entirety of the film in a haze of guilt and squalor. Yet you have no idea who any of these people really are besides what they do, where they’re going, or what has happened to them. Since I could never truly understand them or really relate to them, I found it hard to get farther than just wishing I could feel sorry for them. They’re very empty characters with a lot of serious problems. You have no chance to get to know Briony, especially with the five-year gap that we never actually see in what must’ve been a very dramatic teenage life. And the gap between ages 18 and 77 is massive — surely this character had to have done something with her life in between that’s worth seeing. Instead we are made to believe that she has just been living in a hole somewhere, stewing in her immense guilt and depression the whole time.
Atonement is a very miserable film, literally and figuratively. Which is perhaps why I had such a difficult time digesting this film. You have characters that come and go, and do this and that in what ends up being a very posed and circumstantial fashion. This leaves these characters ringing very hollow. Thus, Atonement tries very hard but never actually reaches the fulfillment you’re looking for in a film of this sort.
Nice review. Similar feelings here. And it didn’t do so well at the Oscars after all (except for best music score).
Thanks for the comment! Feedback is always appreciated. And yes..it didn’t end up doing to well considering the Oscars. I sort of suspected that.