Nick’s one of our long-time chat regulars, a big film fan who seems to always enjoy being able to contribute something. I haven’t heard from him in a little while, but he popped up ready to go with this review of ATONEMENT, which seems to be gaining a lot of traction as a serious Oscar contender.
What begins with the clack of a typewriter ends on the aged face of an author as seen through a video screen a world away. For Jo Wright’s new film 'Atonement' is less about the tragedy of a love torn apart; of the stories of Knightley’s Celia or McAvoy’s Robbie. It is really about their creation and manipulation in the minds of the audience by a jealous and spiteful child.
We find ourselves in the wilting heat of a hot summer day in 1935, the threat of war is in the air, but seemingly locked away by the strange architecture of a family estate and the rambling grounds that surround it. There is an odd unreality to the place; where bombers can be seen passing overhead through the skylight of a green room. Here time seems to warp with the landscape under the intense heat and perception becomes twisted with it.
A dinner party is being prepared for the family of the brittle Celia Turner, elegantly performed by Knightley, recently returned from a time at Cambridge where she avoided her childhood friend Robbie, the son of the estate’s groundsman. Class divides them, but the proud and patient Robbie belies his lowly status thanks to the charismatic presence of McAvoy. Meanwhile Celia’s precocious sister Briony is feeling disgruntled after her recently completed play is discarded for the promise of a cooling dip in the pond. As she sits in a lonely room she is distracted by the flight of an errant bee and through a window a fiction is begun from the first fleeting glimpses of romance beside a stone fountain.
Though a later violent act of passion compounds the decision that follows, it is at this moment that 'Atonement' is elevated above its forbears. Wright subtly replays events, using the opening and shutting of a window to wrap the scene as if Briony has shut herself off from the alternate interpretation the audience is then presented. As Knightley bursts from the waters of the fountain, is the look McAvoy gives her sinister or one of great fondness?
The staid simplicity of many period weepies, of love divided by class lines, is wonderfully shredded by Christopher Hampton’s script as we see how a bitter lie can shake the foundations of the world itself. As Briony falsely accuses Robbie of a heinous crime, her own innocence becomes a perversion rather than purity, transforming the ostensible leads into characters in her new story.
It’s as if her lie brings the war down upon them, as both she and her sister Celia leave for a shattered London to train as nurses while Robbie becomes a Private in the army and finds himself separated from his unit. Wright extends his metaphor of innocence lost with the further deterioration of the characters: Celia at a loss without her love; Briony a ghost burdened by her lie, and Robbie’s mind fading as he tries to cling onto thoughts of what might have been. The horrors of war perfectly epitomises the ruin their lives have become as Robbie drifts past rows of executed children, and searches for sustenance on the chaotic beaches of Dunkirk.
Wright is an obvious talent and this film on the whole cements that. In the earlier scenes we see touches of Malick in his drifting camera and his use of light and nature. He mixes this with more of a classical style, using tilts and tracking shots to produce evocative compositions. A shot through the doorway of a French barn is practically Fordian in its power. However, once Wright has laid out the foundation of Briony’s terrible judgment he seems to lose his way slightly, sinking into an excess of style that though striking such as in the technically brilliant tracking shot at Dunkirk, can be at odds with the carefully constructed mechanism that is the film as a whole.
For it is a mechanism rather than a narrative that makes this film so impressive. The final act or at least section of the film shows the elderly Briony being interviewed about her new autobiographical novel. It is here that 'Atonement' pulls off a clever reversal, turning a central scene between the three characters where love has been reunited, from a truth to a fiction, but a fiction that attempts to rectify the great wrong that has been a splinter in the hearts of them all. It touches on the nature of the author as someone more than just mortal, more akin to a God; seeking to bring back innocence and purity to those who most deserve it. 'Atonement' is most certainly artifice, and most certainly art, choosing not to present an easy ending. It would rather hold back, and build a longing that makes this tale all the more powerful for it. Whether this is capable of touching as much as a more linear or pedestrian narrative might is down to the individual, but for me it was a breath of fresh air in the pervading mustiness of British period drama.
Call me Nick Da Costa
