The Knightley News

Atonement is this year’s The Hours. I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Like The Hours, it’s an adaptation of a literary bestseller split into three sections set in three different time periods. The director is a hot young Brit coming off a surprise popular hit: The Hours was Stephen Daldry’s follow-up to Billy Elliot, while Atonement is Joe Wright’s second film, following the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. It’s built around a tricky postmodern literary conceit—The Hours had its references to Mrs. Dalloway, while Atonement has a rug-pulling final confession by Vanessa Redgrave that makes you re-evaluate much of what you’ve just finished watching. Both movies have incredibly annoying, literal-minded scores—the constant clacking of typewriter keys on the soundtrack of Atonement makes you yearn for the endless arpeggios Philip Glass used to underline every other scene in The Hours. Both movies will undoubtedly be forgotten within 10 months, but they both have that perfect sheen of middlebrow “quality” filmmaking that the Academy and the Golden Globes love to reward with bushels of nominations.

The first section of the film takes place in 1935 during a tremendously eventful day at a vast country house outside London. Sexual tension is mounting between beautiful young aristocratic Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and servant’s son Robbie Turner (James McAvoy, from The Last King of Scotland), a creepy friend of Cecilia’s brother is prowling around the nursery, explicit love letters are being exchanged, trysts are being arranged in the library—and Cecilia’s precocious 13-year-old sister Briony (Saoirsie Ronan) is glimpsing just enough of it all, and has enough of an overactive imagination, to reach a disastrously incorrect impression of what’s actually going on. That night, she accuses Robbie of a terrible crime, essentially destroying his budding medical career, and ruining any chance he and Cecilia might have of finding happiness together.

Although I never quite believed the plot contrivance that accidentally places a shocking piece of paper into Briony’s hands, this part of the film does an expert job of establishing several characters and laying out a complicated series of plot points in a minimum of screen time. But it never feels rushed—indeed, the sequence takes place on a hot, heavy summer day, and Wright ably captures the languorous mood of a weekend in the countryside, when you can barely hear yourself think over the chirping of the grasshoppers. (I’ve heard of actors walking through a performance, but in Atonement, Keira Knightley might be the first person ever to loll through one.)

But once we leave the countryside and rejoin the story five years later during World War II, the film quickly loses its focus, and we realize that the film hasn’t actually persuaded us to care about any of these people: not Cecilia, who remains a beautiful cipher; not Briony (now played by Romola Garai), who has become a nurse tending to severely wounded British soldiers; and not Robbie, who spends this entire middle section of the film wandering, dazed and unshaven, through various meadows and battlefields.

Meanwhile, the tightly plotted intrigue at the country house gives way to a grab bag of wartime vignettes, none of which really build on each other. There’s an insanely ambitious scene, for instance, in which Robbie stumbles around the beach at Dunkirk during the 1940 evacuation—Wright shoots it in a single take that incorporates thousands of costumed extras, massive props (including a grounded ship and a Ferris wheel), and seemingly impossible-to-choreograph action, like the guy who puts two wounded horses down with his pistol as Robbie passes by. The sequence should be amazing, exhilarating, terrifying, but instead it’s a yawn: it feels like a funhouse ride, with various bits of staged business prepared for us around every corner.

What’s more, there’s absolutely no reason for it to be in the movie, which is ostensibly about Briony and her fruitless efforts to make up for her false accusation against Robbie. But Wright and Hampton never figure out how to take you inside Briony’s head, or feel the painful, ineffective urgency of her guilt. (Or, perhaps, her inability to appreciate the full consequences of her actions.)

Admittedly, their hands are somewhat tied by the way Ian McEwan’s original novel is structured so that it builds up to the big surprise ending. But then they alter the meaning of that ending so fundamentally, it’s outrageous—a reversal that once served as a breathtaking indictment of Briony now redeems Briony and gives Cecilia and Robbie’s romance a happy Hollywood ending... provided, of course, you’re willing to accept the film’s solipsistic logic.

Atonement is a good-looking, well-crafted movie—the costumes are really pretty. But it’s a good-looking shell, a deeply internal story that’s been turned into nothing but externals, and if the prognosticators are right and this movie wins Best Picture in a year that produced No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, and The Assassination of Jesse James... well, the Academy will have plenty to atone for.