ATONEMENT

Director: Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice)
Starring: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy

This film is getting some of the best reviews of the year. Generally, you can count my blogtastic voice in with that chorus of more meaningful reviewers. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, although I won't quite rave about it. In fact when it was over, my first thought was that the movie deserved another 15 to 20 minutes of story. The fact that I wanted *more* from the film says a lot. Especially when every 3rd film I see these days drags on for 10 minutes too long, and you can't wait to get out of the theater.

I can't talk about the story without noting just how melodramatic it is. In fact I had quite the battle between my cynical self and my good side about just how good of a movie this was. In the end, I liked the movie a lot. It will probably be one of the year's best. I don't think it's even in the same league as the best English period pieces (Howard's End, Remains of the Day), but it is a fine production that deserves to be seen.

If you read many reviews, rest assured that mine will be the only one written by someone who hasn't read the ubiquitous novel. I should note that the only reason for that was because I just had too much else to do when the book was nominated in my book club a few years ago. Technically, I own the book. It's on my shelf. I think it even made it to my bedstand at one point. But that's it. So I have fresh eyes, so to speak. The other reviews I've read all seem insistant on comparing it to the written word. I can speak only to the visual story ...

... which was astounding. I'm frankly a little surprised this was an adapted tale. There were a handful of scenes which were purely cinematic in their storytelling. In one of the better uses of visuals I've ever seen in a film, we occasionally would first see a scene from the perspective of one character and then later through the eyes of the characters actually performing the action. For instance, to a young girl looking through her window (a young, exceedingly creative and intelligent girl, I'll add), it's surprising how different someone diving into a pool to retrieve a piece of a vase can look. This theme of perspective is imperative to the story ...

... which tells the tale of two young lovers (Knightley as the aristocrat & McAvoy from a lower class), and how the tiniest of things (simply the different 'perspective' of a little girl) can ruin their lives. From the girl's perspective she thinks she sees one thing, when in fact her eyes and her nature and her limited wisdom have betrayed her. She ends up accussing her sister's lover of a horrendous crime and he is convicted. He is given the option of fighting in France (in World War II) in lieu of his prison sentence, which he does. I should note here the marvelous visual scene of the famous British evacuation at Dunkirk. It's a very impressive bit of film artistry.

Later we see that the two sisters have both become nurses to aid the war effort on the home front. The young girl (now 18 - Romola Garmai) almost certainly has taken on the nurse role in some sense to atone for her past misdeed. I won't divulge how the story ends, but it involves a surprising, and quite interesting take on the specifics of atonment, cowardice, artistic license, lying, self-deception and even more on perspective. Perspective is as much the core of this story as is atonement, probably even more I think. Think how different perspectives result in terrorists, or Nazis, or basically good Republicans in favor of torture, or liberals who've been silly enough to join PETA. The choices hardly need to be as extreme as these examples, but so many of our choices are not arrived at rationally, scientifically, carefully weighed. Nope the paths we take are more often just the result of the same perspectives that drove the little girl - the limited view of the world we each possess, our own individual natures, and our varying degrees of experience. The truth is that we all need to atone for our hasty judgements, every one of us.

Standouts: A spectacular melding of a novel to the visual story-telling of the screen.
Blowouts: I almost found the story too melodramatic to enjoy.

Grade: A