Atonement Review
by [email protected] (sdo230 AT gmail DOT com)December 12th, 2007
Atonement
reviewed by Samuel Osborn
Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: (based upon the novel by Ian McEwan
Cast: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan
MPAA Classification: PG-13
It's a tricky maneuver, bridging the gravitas of a novel into the film medium. Between The Golden Compass, No Country for Old Men, Beowulf, and I Am Legend, I've committed a lot of words to adaptation this month. Atonement is the finest, however. It is absolutely most impressive because it dedicates itself to being a film, a movie, a flick. It is definitely of the cinematic medium, which is a sort of evolution beyond the standard translation. By this I mean that Atonement does more than put faces to characters. It embraces the novel as a creature of photography and sound and story. In other words, I don't give a damn about what happened in the book. Because Atonement is a monster of its own originality.
Its story is a thorny, knotted bastard, tricking even itself near the end, where the evidence on screen has its own ulterior motives. But reduced to its base, Atonement accounts the love three people have for each other and the brutal actions they take to express it. To this there's a catalyst, in which young Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) incidentally witnesses a series of events that leads her to accuse the English estate's gardener, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy)--also her unrequited crush--of a serious crime. The third character entangled is Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley), Briony's lounging, brooding, older sister--also in love with Mr. Turner. Briony's accusation tightens the knot stringing the three characters together; and because the producers have gone to such lengths to keep Atonement's secrets from illumination, that is all I'm willing to give away. You're now supposed to feel vaguely informed and intensely intrigued.
Well anyway, if you don't feel mysteriously engaged now, trust me that you will when the time comes. Because without suffocating you with boring facts about filmic form (ugh, I know), Atonement is a work of intense technical beauty. The cinematography eschews the shot/matching- shot standard for an almost obsessive interest in light and color and composition.
And the score, oh the score! Consisting of the clicks of a typewriter, it often falls into the raps of a drumline rhythm. Composer Dario Marianelli draws diagetic noises (for non-film geeks, that's sound from within the story world) like the banging of an umbrella upon the hood of a car, or the scratch of a lighter as it sparks, and blends them in as instruments to his own orchestra. The point, and this is made wondrously clear as the film rolls on, is that the telling of a story can be manipulated using any tool at the storyteller's
disposal.
In this way, time in Atonement reverses and doubles over on itself, deploying one scene on multiple occasions so as to understand it from different characters' perspectives. This poses an issue for the actors, as they have to sustain their character with only the evidence they've been permitted. But the talent is superb among everyone. James McAvoy has steadily and surprisingly become a valid, impressive force, while Keira Knightley continues to smolder under pouty lips and that emotive slouch of hers. Saoirse Ronan is the bread-winner, however, as Briony. No more than thirteen years old, Ms. Ronan controls her Briony as effectively and seriously as any Dakota Fanning or young Haley Joel Osment.
Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) has directed this film as though it were his own original work. And though it's not--author Ian McEwan breathes through with every plot corner--he has composed it with the tools of a cinematic storyteller, not a literary one. Character revelations come with camera angles and not from internal monologues. Mr. Wright has proven himself as a master of the period cinema, working with the same talented crew that constructed the magnificent costumes and sets that made Victorian England in Pride and Prejudice, now achieving 1935 England and 1939 France. His Atonement is original and absurdly forceful. It is tragedy and love on an epic scale, and a legitimate definition of the brutal consequences of a human in love. Samuel Osborn
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