"Atonement"

Redemption song

“Atonement”

The talk has been about the dress (shiny green) and the long track shot (long). There's more to "Atonement" than that, but is it a good enough movie to convince us that fiction can atone for reality? Atonement might be a theological term, but break the word apart and it almost has a mundane quality: at-one-ment. Briony Tallis, the protagonist of the Joe Wright film, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, arrives at at-one-ment through confabulation. The lesson implied is that — hey, take it easy, make stuff up, have a good time! The effect is far different. By the end of the movie, besides leaving the theater with a heavy heart and wanting to listen to "La Boheme," over and over, I didn't really know what to think of what Wright did to McEwan. The film starts off in tandem with the novel; McEwan shows off his passion for language while Wright uses his editing and pacing vocabulary to achieve a sassy virtuosity. Briony, played in the first act of the movie by Saoirse Ronan, is the typical nineteen-thirties English estate’s resident teenage nobility in a white dress, complete with a literary ambition that has her whipping out a first play with the title “The Trials of Arabella.” If you smell overcompensation because of sexual angst, you’re right. Her fascination with the housekeeper’s handsome son, Robbie Turner (played by James McAvoy), some ten years her elder, and what he and her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) know about rounding the bases that Briony doesn’t know with confidence yet, is the driving force for what happens in much of the movie. Everyone at some point in the teens — except Helmut Newton — thinks sex is bad somehow, but McEwan takes the condition to its logical conclusion. When Briony misinterprets, Rashomon-style, an act of sexual tension between Robbie and Cecilia, it signals the start of a sequence of events that becomes material for her to weave into a real-life paranoia plot — funny if it wasn’t tragic that personalities like Bill O’Reilly also love fodder of this type.

Briony, in a sense, is a passenger on a redemption train eternally trying to play catch-up to the greatest generation, the people who will forever get the first sympathetic mention in the World War II chapter of history books. The second act chronicles Robbie's sacrifice, having been forced into being a member of this reluctantly heroic club. McEwan rehashed the not-so-bold suggestion that the British working class was dropped into the war to ensure the survival of the nobility, and the snap shot taken of this endeavor is the Dunkirk evacuation, where 330,000 British and French soldiers waited for Godot. McEwan thought it was tragedy; Wright considers the whole episode a cruel joke — young men were simply waiting for Dover ferries that were really behind schedule. Wright depicts the evacuation as a carnival. Some have likened Robbie's journey to Dante's through Purgatory, but to Wright, this is Rabelais.

Then, Vanessa Redgrave shows up. She appears for only several minutes, and she is in what seems to be a different movie, certainly no longer the period epic we were watching earlier. Readers familiar with McEwan’s novel know what scene she is supposed to perform in, but viewers alien to the book might be wondering if Redgrave is getting ready for a colonoscopy in the year 2050. Close enough — she is being interviewed in a television studio, but even McEwan readers will be alarmed at how clinical the book’s majestic epilogue has become in the hands of Wright. Redgrave is the now old, dying and vascular dementia-stricken Briony, delivering her final atonement, which appears in the novel as the following: “I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end.” In the novel, those words were a little trite. In the movie, treated by such a master as Redgrave, Briony’s atonement becomes downright chilling. Looking at Redgrave’s gently yet frighteningly demented face uttering those words raises so many questions — How can anyone believe in such a crock of bull? Does she really think that writers can play God, or is that her dementia talking? The book never seemed ambivalent, but the film is about the very idea that ambivalence — the viewer’s ambivalence towards what he or she just saw — is better than delusional thinking, for example, that lies can whitewash all ambivalence. There is no at-one-ment about Wright's movie. He has fashioned a moving yet insolent and strange take on the novel, and whereas McEwan is a master of sharp-shooting storytelling, Wright turned the English novelist's greatest work into a study of grotesque psychological realism. I'll take that any day.