I am always wary when a favorite book of mine is adapted into a movie since the last two books that had an indelible emotional effect on me, Michael Oondatje’s The English Patient and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, were adapted into movies that were unsatisfying, unable to approximate the intellectual and emotional richness of the fictional works that I so treasured. So when I heard that Ian McEwen’s Atonement, my holy grail of fiction from the past five years, the one book that I vociferously praised to friends and relentlessly pushed them to read, was going to be adapted into a film starring, gulp, Keira Knightley of all people, I was filled with dread (the sort that a rat feels when it sniffs rat poison in the air). I am pleased to report, though, that even if the film version of Atonement does not by any means equal the greatness of the novel (and I don’t think it could ever have in my mind), it is, in itself, a well-made, literate, thoughtful, beautifully designed, photographed, and acted production that serves its source work well. Not quite the masterpiece I wanted to see, but a solid B+ (bordering on A-), and I think that’s good enough for this fan of the novel.
The first half of the film is superb. Set in an English country home during one, hot summer day, the lives of an affluent English family are changed forever when the teenage daughter Briony concocts a devastating lie after seeing her elder sister Cecilia having sex with the housekeeper’s son Robbie, who has grown up with the family and whose Oxford education has been paid for by Cecilia and Briony’s father. In this part of the movie, the director Joe Wright and the screenwriter Christopher Hampton (the great playwright of “Les Liasons Dangerouses”) successfully evoke the lifestyle and preoccupations of the pre-war English elite. Additionally, I think they are able to remain faithful to McEwen’s themes-clarifying and making believable the compelling reasons for Briony’s vicious act, both at the macro class level (the co-dependent but implicitly antagonistic relationship between the English elite and their servants) and the micro individual level (Briony’s adolescent sexual confusion). They are immensely aided by a young actress named Saoirse Ronan, who gives an amazing, deeply expressive performance as Briony. I think the second half of the film, when the story shifts between wartime London and the area around Dunkirk, where Robbie, who is now in the army, is waiting to be evacuated, is less engaging. For me, the tensions that made me race through the book (will Cecilia and Robbie be reunited? Will Briony ever be forgiven?) are just not there in this part of the movie, primarily because I don’t think Wright and Hampton are able to successfully capture the very critical shift in point of view that the book possesses. Atonement, the novel, is meta-fiction of the most sophisticated and profound kind, with McEwen’s brilliance lying not just in the wonderful, evocative words that he uses, but also in his ability to conceal from us (until the excellent ending) that the book we are so caught up in reading is actually the novel that Briony has written to seek redemption and yes, atonement, for her lie. As the highly-regarded film critic Joe Morgenstern wrote in his review in the Wall Street Journal, “In the book these abstract considerations play out slowly, and narrative voices change imperceptibly. Movies are by nature more literal, and often need to move quickly to hold our attention.” Film as a medium really cannot in the end capture the powerful impact of fiction where techniques are so much more fluid, less literal, and where a reader’s imagination is such an active participant.
However, there is so much to love and admire in Atonement, the movie. The cinematography by Seamus McGarvey is stunningly realized, the costume and production design are meticulous, and the acting of everyone is impeccable. James McAvoy, who I thought was more interesting in Last King of Scotland than Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, is excellent as Robbie (which female or gay male in the Landmark theatre last Sunday did not have their hearts flutter when tears started running down his cheeks?) I must grudgingly admit too that Vanessa Redgrave, who dissed me at the Kennedy Center a couple of years by refusing to autograph my “Hecuba” playbill, is highly effective as the old Briony in a five minute cameo which has so much narrative significance. Then there’s Keira Knightley. Ok, I gotta give it to her, she’s good. But, can someone attach an IV drip to that chick? From the way her scary skeletal structure looked (which nearly wrecked the beautiful green dress she was wearing during the party scene), she seems to be sniffing food, not eating it. And does her contract have provisions that in every scene she should always be backlit, have her cheekbones highlighted, and be wearing Chanel Super Hydrabase deep scarlet lipstick? In the scene when Briony visits Cecilia in a hideous London slum, there’s muddy swine, a heinously attired grubby landlady, crumbling planks and wooden boards…and Keira Knightley posing in the door frame, tattered robe fashionably draped on her bones, wearing the friggin deep scarlet lipstick, looking like she’s about ready to compete in Miss World. I nearly snorted out through my nose the Diet Sprite I was sipping.
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