Film Reviews	The Art of Lying: Atonement by George Sax

Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in "Atonement."

Much of the critical response to the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement, has focused on the film’s epic scope and the intensely but tragically romantic story it tells. There has even been some comparison with James Cameron’s Titanic.

Atonement certainly has a finely detailed period feel, historical sweep and a tale of thwarted love. Its adaptation has been efficiently and deftly fashioned by playwright/screenwriter Christopher Hampton from McEwan’s critically admired and surprisingly popular 2001 novel (his first commercial success after a career of over a quarter century). The narrative superstructure of director Joe Wright’s movie is a reasonable cinematic facsimile of McEwen’s intricate, shape-changing storytelling.

Wright and Hampton even have a go at tackling the novelist’s sharply unsettling resolution. Theirs is no disrespectful, vulgar misappropriation of the literary work. Still, there’s some room for doubt about whether they’ve succeeded.

Like the book, the film opens on high summer on the Tallis family’s English countryside estate in 1935, as Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), a housekeeper’s son, is toiling outside as a gardener. Robbie is also a Cambridge grad of very recent vintage who harbors aspirations to a medical career. His education has been paid for by the head of the house, and his status, while somewhat ill-defined, is higher than just a family retainer.

Inside the mansion, 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoise Ronan) is writing a play to be performed by young family members at a clan gathering. From her window she witnesses a tense, startling and erotically charged scene on the lawn between Robbie and her elder sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley). Still a child, Briony has no adequate means to accurately register this encounter, and when that night she happens upon these same two young people engaged in an almost desperate, impromptu sexual congress in the library of the house, she is still more startled and disturbed. In short order, after a third sexual incident, an alleged attack on her 15-year-old female cousin by an unidentified man, Briony falsely accuses Robbie and he’s arrested.

Wright did a version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice a couple of years ago whose tone was rather too plummy, but he’s got things just about right in these scenes. He’s caught the lush, placid, privileged ease, and also the obscurely ominous, tense current drifting through this ostensibly friendly, enlightened setting. (He’s abetted by Seamus McGarvey’s carefully elegant but vivid cinematography.)

It’s when Atonement skips ahead five years—not the four the movie puzzlingly announces—that things become subtly more problematic. Robbie has been released from prison to the armed forces and is part of the retreating British army that’s trapped between the Germans and the English Channel at Dunkirk. Cecilia and Briony (now played by Romola Garai) are serving as nurses in London military hospitals. Cecilia still refuses to have anything to do with her sister because of the terrible lie she told.

Wright provides a boldly spectacular piece of filmmaking as he surveys the vast confusion and shambles of Dunkirk. In one riveting, five-minute-long take, as Robbie wanders with two mates along the shore, weakening in mind and body, Wright tracks after him, weaving away to pan across a crazy-quilt of visual vignettes that achieve an aggregate phantasmagoric quality, and then tracking the quietly desperate Robbie again. It’s going to be a film school staple and it’s masterful. It’s also a sign of the troubles haunting the movie.

Atonement has been shifting time and perspectives since shortly after it began, and, as it moves to its conclusion, it introduces a drastically deconstructive revelation, delivered by the now seventyish Briony (Vanessa Redgrave). She’s become an accomplished and respected novelist, and, mortally ill, she reveals—confesses really—what she and the movie have been concealing in the storyline.

Wright and Hampton make a genuine and artful attempt to comprehend McEwan’s tricky but bleak novel in their film, but the effort is undermined by the novelist and their own concern to portray the three main characters sympathetically, even poignantly. They’ve striven to arrive at some kind of final balance through a sort of aesthetic recompense, the bookkeeping of art and artistic compassion, but it eludes them.

Robbie and Cecelia aren’t Tristan and Isolde, or a pair of post-Shakespearean star-crossed lovers. They’re really more Briony’s artistic pawns, as readers of the novel are forced to realize. In it, McEwan has her observe, “How can a novelist achieve atonement…when she’s also God?”

The film tries for bittersweet, but even its own softened presentation of the novel’s elements makes this goal dubious. It’s sensuously arresting, technically assured and impressively performed by its cast, but it doesn’t quite cohere. The filmmakers can’t manage to assert their own narrative and thematic authority. The lies in Atonement resist the balance and compensation the film wants to achieve.