Atonement

Atonement is a film I’ve been meaning to see for awhile. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and I’m a big fan of Joe Wright and Keira Knightley collaborations. It’s also from the fabled year of 2007, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly how good that year is. Atonement is yet another great reason to argue for the year 2007, because it is a really emotional, thought provoking film with a great cast turning in great performances.

Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is a thirteen year old girl who wants to be a writer. Let’s just think about people who want to be writers for a second, specifically fiction writers, as in Briony’s case. Put quite simply, they like to make things up, the more exciting the better. Add that to the fact that this girl is only thirteen and has hidden motivations of her own, and you’re going to run into problems. She’s just finished a play, and is trying to get all of her cousins to participate in it. It’s not going too well. Lola (Juno Temple) seems more interested in stealing the spotlight than anything else, and her two younger twin brothers can’t focus for that long (they’re about seven or eight). Briony’s current creative outlet is not panning out as she had hoped.

So she watches her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley), who seems to be having a good time (more interesting anyway). She’s having a relationship with Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) who seems to be some sort of servant, though he dreams of becoming a doctor. Briony’s a bit jealous of them I’m guessing. She doesn’t have anything to do, nobody’s paying attention to her, and here her sister is going on with some guy she fancied a bit anyway. She has an overactive imagination, and only some of the facts. Things are going to get muddled, in a big way. Robbie needs to send a note to Cecilia, but ends up writing a couple to see which one sounds best. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out he’s going to send the wrong one. Cecilia is able to forgive him, but when Briony reads it, she gets the wrong idea. Later, she sees them together and is even more worried. The editing in that scene makes it pretty horrific, I have to say. It completely puts you in her perspective, and in that moment it’s not a very comfortable place to be.

Half of Briony’s problem is that she always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not to minimize her responsibility, but she is faced with a pretty big decision to make. As she says later, she is only thirteen. In her mind, she is trying to help. Should she have handled this differently? That’s a big yes. Even given the small amount of information she has, it’s clear to see that she’s doing the wrong thing even as she’s doing it. But, you can also see where she’s coming from, even without taking her overactive imagination into account. She may have her own agenda, but I still believe that she was also trying to help.

Later in the day, the twins go missing. Everyone goes out looking for them, but Briony finds something else instead, something altogether more unsettling. It’s Lola getting raped, and she thinks the rapist is Robbie but she’s not one hundred percent sure. Given everything else she’s seen, she feels that she has enough reason to implicate him. In reality though, there this one very telling scene closer to the beginning that lets you know who the real culprit is. That’s a great scene; one of the best in the movie in my opinion. As soon as that scene came on, I got pretty suspicious. If you want to know more, you’ll have to go to the spoiler section.

WHICH IS RIGHT NOW! SPOILER ALERT!

The only thing I really question about this film, is how self-important Briony is. The film makes it clear that she, and she alone, was responsible for Robbie and Cecilia not being together. The truth is, they died in the war. There is a whole world that could get in the way, and Briony is just a part of it. Even at the end, Briony feels that she has enough power to completely ruin two lives. Who knows if they even would have stayed together, had she not done what she did? Much of this is her telling of it, of course. How much of it is true and how much of it is her own imagination and self-importance talking? You’d think she’d have learned better after what had happened, but the thing about writers is they always want someone to listen to them. She also feels as if she has enough power, through writing, to atone for what she did. It’s a nice gesture, but ultimately it’s just making herself feel better. While she realizes what she did was wrong, the thinking that got her into doing wrong in the first place still seems present to me.

The bigger tragedy here, in my opinion, is that of Lola. Though I was saddened by what Robbie and Cecilia had to go through, prison, the war, being separated, dying alone, etc etc… but think about it for a second. The real villain of the story, Paul Marshal (Benedict Cumberbatch), is the only one that gets the girl! And it’s the girl he raped! I feel so bad for her; she can basically never escape and must be living in fear of him for her whole life. Of course, we don’t have all the facts and based on a key scene early in the film maybe it was consensual and then she lied about it to protect herself but I don’t think that’s very likely. The annoying thing about this film, that I am just realizing now, is that it reduces this to a side story that is only important for letting Briony know just how badly she screwed up. The film doesn’t give much thought to how she messed up regarding Lola and Paul though, it just sends her straight back to Robbie and Cecilia. This wasn’t noticeable to me when I was watching the film because I was involved in what was going on, but it seems a big injustice to me now that I think about it.

END SPOILERS

So it turns out I have some pretty big gripes with the story and the decisions the characters make, but I don’t think that hurts my viewing of the movie. At the end of the day, that seems to be part of the point. Regardless of the story, I have to admire the other elements in this film. One is the period feel of it. Wright does a great job at recreating the 30s and 40s of World War II. The costumes and production design are pretty great. Outshining even those however, is the score. Dario Marionelli is the composer and his is a very unique score that is given a central role in the film. He uses a lot of everyday sounds and incorporates them into the score for a great effect.

Atonement is a wonderful film that really solidifies my opinion of 2007 as a really good year for film. Though I personally would still take There Will Be Blood from that year, I can’t fault anyone having this at the top of their list. This is a great story that you can analyze, the direction is stylish but doesn’t get in the way, the score is amazing and so are the performances. Everything works here, and even if the story does make me a bit mad, I think that’s the objective when all is said and done. Though I can’t see myself rewatching this a lot, because of how emotional it is, I would definitely recommend it.

“How old do you have to be before you know the difference between right and wrong?”

Long story short: 3.5/4 stars