Movie Review: Atonement

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Atonement (2007)–*1/2

Ugh.

There’s really no other way to start a review of Atonement, director Joe Wright’s dutifully dour attempt at adapting Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name.

Ugh.

As rapturous as a perfume commercial and as romantic as an Old Navy ad, Atonement rarely touches an audience’s romantic spirit or its emotional sensibilities. There’s a reason for that, mostly because it is told from the perspective of someone who never ever really knows love.

I can only assume that there is no love in the sad eyes of an elderly Briony Tallis (played as an old woman by Vanessa Redgrave). When she sits down for an interview in the last moments of the film she explains her culpability in the lost love life of the film’s main protagonists, Celia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy). She wrote it down in a book called Atonement. Being a writer of considerable talent at the age of 13 (Saoirse Ronan), it’s no surprise that writing is her way of coming to terms with ending a budding love affair after falsely accusing Robbie of raping a house guest.

Robbie, who worked on Celia’s family estate and aspired to be a practicing doctor, ends up as a soldier in WWII, choosing war over prison, and Celia is a nurse. They remain parted, mostly, throughout the film, and Briony at 18 (Romola Garai), also a nurse, just begins to realize the consequences of her actions.

The book is Briony’s attempt to, well, atone for the actions that devastated a love affair. She writes it because she wants to give the couple’s love the legitimacy it deserves. If Atonement is her way of making amends for what she did, she owes Robbie and Celia another apology.

Atonement‘s love story relies heavily on the screen chemistry of McAvoy and Knightley, whom barely share a moment on screen together beyond a quick fuck in the estate’s library. Like the failed love story in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, Celia and Robbie’s story is wholly intangible because we are never given the opportunity to fall in love with them falling in love. Unlike Cold Mountain, Atonement lacks the deeply human touch of a filmmaker as talented as Minghella.

One moment does stand out. It’s when we meet the 18-year-old Briony doing her self-determined penance as a nurse during WWII. At night when the other nurses are sleeping, Briony writes her story of a young girl who sees something she doesn’t understand, but thinks she does. Watching Briony attend to soldiers with care and selflessness, and discovering just how hard she has thought about her actions from only 5 years earlier, we begin to empathize with Briony.

Unfortunately, the film is hardly about Briony. Director Joe Wright focuses the project on what he may wish had been a grand, decorous romantic epic on the scale of Titanic. It’s not. Atonement is a film with annoyances that make little technical sense before an elderly Briony explains everything to us. After she does, the film feels more hollow than it did before. Atonement is a wasted, visionless bust. Now, it’s Wrights turn to atone?

Atonement, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, directed by Joe Wright, is now playing in select cities.