Atonement

There is a scene halfway through Atonement that encapsulates a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the film as a whole. It’s a five minute long tracking shot of a trio of dazed soldiers walking along the beach at Dunkirk before the British evacuation. The camera glides along, capturing carnivelesque scenes of surreal apocalypse, a menagerie of war-crazed humanity, without a single cut It’s a jaw-dropping set piece, gripping and expertly choreographed. And it doesn’t really work. While the shot itself is an astonishing technical achievement, the impact is undercut by an overbearing, generic orchestral score similar to one you’ve probably heard in hundreds of period romance and war films. Also undermining the impact is the fact that, like most of the scenes in the film’s fragmented second half, it doesn’t seem relevant to that which comes before or after.


The first half is another story. For its opening hour, Atonement is a model of narrative economy, insight and empathy. On a hot summer day on an English country estate in the mid-thirties, a wealthy aristocrat Cecilia (Kira Knightley) and groundskeeper Robbie (James McAvoy) confront the long-simmering romantic feelings they’ve been harboring for each other. Meanwhile, Knightley’s precocious, literary-minded sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan) stumbles onto the couple in a romantic clinch and makes a decision that causes irrevocable harm to everyone involved. The entire sequence is compelling. It’s propelled forward by deft editing that conveys depths of emotions and entire personal histories without a word of dialogue and a percussive score anchored by the jarring report of Briony’s Smith Corona.


Unfortunately, the film cannot maintain the momentum or focus of these scenes. The film jumps forward four years, when Robbie has been conscripted into the British Expeditionary Force in France and a remorseful Briony avoids entering Cambridge in order to do penance for her transgression as a military nurse in London. At this point, the film alternates between hallucinatory scenes that carry serious lyrical power, and surprisingly cliché romantic iconography. None of the scenes gel in relation to one another, with this disharmony culminating in an abrupt twist ending that negates much of what came before it. The twist reveals that the film is not really about the enduring power of love, but rather the enduring power of storytelling. It turns out that the real interest of the filmmakers, and presumably novelist Ian McEwan, upon whose novel the film is based, is the way that people tell themselves narratives in order to organize and give meaning to their lives, as well as the damage (and kindness) that can be done when people try to impose their imaginary narratives on those around them. This means that a lot of the more formulaic romance film moments have less to do with the relationships of the characters than in our fantasy notions of idealized romance. Still, the meta-fictional gloss doesn’t make it feel any less eye-rollingly familiar when Robbie runs behind Cecilia’s bus as it drives away, with violins swelling on the soundtrack.

Score: 7.9