ATONEMENT Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Focus Features
Grade: B+
Directed by: Joe Wright
Written By: Christopher Hampton, from Ian McEwan's novel
Cast: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Saoirse Ronan, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda
Blethyn, Juno Temple, Patrick kennedy, Benedict Cumberbatch, harriet Walter, Michelle Duncan, Gina
McKee, Daniel Mays, Alfie Allen
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 118/07
Opens: December 7, 2007 Don’t shrug off your grandmother’s homilies and fortune-cookie aphorisms. Some of the old sayings are as true as they are trite. The expression “count to ten before you act” is something everyone should be reminded of daily; in fact, count to one hundred, nice and s-l-o-w would be more like it, because people do impulsive things out of anger that they regret minutes, hours, days, even years later. Then they spend minutes, hours, days, years, sometimes the rest of their lives atoning for their rash behavior and abysmal stupidity. Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement,” which is brilliantly adapted by playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton–a book which just barely missed winning the coveted Booker prize–is about a young woman who felt the need to atone for a sinful deed she committed while on the thrust of adulthood, at the tender age of thirteen. It took her five years to set things right, and then again, in an ironic conclusion to the novel and to the movie, which faithfully follows the tome’s trajectory, we find out that perhaps she has not been forgiven after all–that she will have to live with her foolish choice for the rest of her years. The filmed version is exquisitely photographed by Seamus McGarvey in the south of England particularly in Shropshire (the book used Surrey), and is at least as much about period setting as it is about story. The tale is fascinating, told by director Joe Wright using the oft-use technique of rewinding some scenes to give some views at different angles, thereby supplying alternate interpretations–particularly one shot of the leading male character’s jump into an estate’s fountain to retrieve part of a broken vase. Opening in 1935 and concluding decades later, “Atonement” takes us first to the fabulously rich Tallis household navigated by the hyperactive, fantasy-filled thirteen-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan), who has a crush on Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), who is the son of a housekeeper, Grace Turner (Brenda Blethyn). With hormones beginning to churn, Briony has a crush on Robbie, an educated fellow planning to go to medical school. Well beneath the social class of the Tallis family, Robbie, in turn, has a mad desire for Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley), a rebellious sort who nonetheless keeps her emotions in check. When young Briony misinterprets her older sister’s stripping down to her underwear in front of Robbie, she concocts a story, accusing Robbie of a sex crime of which he is entirely innocent, dashing Robbie’s med-school dreams, sending him to jail and then into the British army during World War II where he ends up in northern France. Since “Atonement” is an epic tale and not simply a family drama on the common theme of British social class warfare, director Joe Wright offers us scenes of warfare, albeit with limited use of outright fighting and explosions, concentrating instead on rows of dead and mutilated bodies on the fields and on the dying and wounded in hospitals cared for by nurses. It is in the hospital that the now 18-year-old Brione (Romola Garai) serves as a nurse, where the effects of the battlefield and thereby the love that she denied to both her sister and Robbie hit home hard, giving her the motivation to atone. James McAvoy, puppy-ish and idealistic as Idi Amin’s personal Scottish physician, Nicholas Garrigan, in
Kevin MacDonald’s “The Last King of Scotland,” comes into his own in “Atonement”: this is his picture, as he fleshes out a fully mature role as a refined lover held down by the repulsive British class system, yet determined to win the love of his life only to be crushed by the lies of a diabolical 13-year-old. While “Atonement” should have been shot in wide-screen, the picture is a lovely achievement with a clever twist in the concluding moments (supplied by Vanessa Redgrave as the aging and dying Brione). Rated R. 122 minutes © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
