THE STORY

The year is 1935 and 13-year-old Briony Tallis has just finished her first play. Wanting to impress her beloved eldest brother who's about to come home, Briony ropes in her reluctant cousins for rehearsals. But the young twins are shockingly untalented and Lola, 15 and far more precocious than Briony in the ways of the world, conspire to wreck any hopes of a performance. Brooding, Briony’s overactive imagination takes a turn for the scandalous when she misinterprets a scene between her sister Cecilia and Robbie, the housemaid’s son whose Cambridge education had been sponsored by the girls’ father.

Shaken and feeling protective towards her sister, Briony is doubly shocked when she finds Cecilia and Robbie in a compromising position in the library later that evening. When Lola gets into serious trouble that very night, Briony is convinced that the person responsible is Robbie. Her evidence is enough to convict him and he is imprisoned. When WWII breaks out a few years later, Robbie trades his prison sentence for service. The breast pocket of his army jacket full of treasured letters from Cecilia, letters in which she exhorts him to ‘Come back to me’, he struggles to stay alive in order to return to her.

Meanwhile, Briony has grown up and is beginning a nursing career in London, tending to soldiers maimed and injured in the war. When she discovers some news about Lola, she becomes convinced that she owes her older sister a personal apology. Is her nursing career, taken up in lieu of a comfortable and privileged stint at Cambridge, not enough atonement for her childhood mistake? Or will her writing, which she has kept up all these years, have to atone for her? And if so, in what way?

THE THEMES

It would be no spoiler to say that Atonement is, thematically, about Writing (and its corollaries, Imagination and Creation). After all, the movie fairly rubs your nose in it, from the very first image (that of typewriter keys pounding out letters), even from the very first sounds that precede this image (the clacking of typewriter keys). OK, Mr Director, we get it. Atonement is about Writing and Imagination and Creation—their power, their limitations and, perhaps most controversial of all, their treachery. After all, the same event seen from different perspectives can be readily misinterpreted when essential information is hidden or unavailable, and the imaginative mind--the creative mind--will fabricate half-truths or even complete falsehoods to try and explain the inexplicable. But then, if we were to create something in writing that is so beautiful and so compelling and so right, would that not somehow make up for the fact that it never happened?

SO, DID THEY GET IT RIGHT?

It is the hardest job in the world to adapt a full-length novel of 300+pages into a two-hour screenplay, and screenwriter Christopher Hampton and director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) have managed to keep the core of the story firmly in hand. The growth of the characters is well handled, due in no small part to excellent casting and acting by some very gifted actors. In particular, all the main characters (Kiera Knightley as Cecilia, James McAvoy as Robbie, and especially newcomers Saoirse Ronan as the young Briony and Romola Garai as her older self) fully inhabit their roles. Though I have to say that Knightley is looking frighteningly anorexic, and her skeletal frame quite spoils the scenes where she wears the green gown (written in such loving detail by McEwan in the novel, the poor gown positively shrinks away from Knightley’s wasted, stick-like body), and the pivotal scene by the fountain is rendered a tad ridiculous—after all, Robbie is supposed to be transfixed by Cee’s semi-nudity, yet why any male worth his salt would be transfixed by ribs poking out of a flat chest is quite beyond me.

Personally, I found the treatment of the much-vaunted ending extremely heavy-handed. In the novel, the reader is expected to read between the lines. That slow realization of something not quite right here, of wool having been pulled over our eyes, is unexpected, horrific even, but it unfolds in such slow and deliberate fashion, and in such ambiguous language, that the reader has to work to get to the bottom of it, and that, in my opinion, makes it that much more effective. Much more so than, say, being whacked over the head by a narrator telling us: ‘Look here, folks. This is what REALLY happened.’ McEwan gives his readers much more credit than that.

Likewise, the library scene is one of the highlights of the novel and is one of the most affecting and tender love scenes you can hope to read. In the movie, the tenderness is completely missing, and while the scene is effective, especially from one point of view, the emotional intimacy between the lovers is completely lost.

There are also some flash-back scenes near the beginning, when events are told again from a different viewpoint than Briony’s, to show what she had missed and therefore misinterpreted. It’s a good approach, but could have been handled better to avoid viewer confusion. Also, there are some overblown scenes in the movie straight out of the screenwriter’s head. I think their purpose is to draw emotion from the audience, a feat accomplished by McEwan with much less overwrought scenarios.

CONCLUSION

While the movie Atonement is a fair enough adaptation, it does not begin to hold a candle to the original novel. Ian McEwan is a writers’s writer and Atonement is one of his masterpieces. If you do not enjoy the movie, you will still be pleasantly surprised by the book. And if you do enjoy the movie, the novel will blow you away.


Read my review of the novel Atonement here:
http://www.epinions.com/content_414939713156

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older