Review: Atonement

* * * *

James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Blethyn.  Directed by Joe Wright.  Screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan.  Rated R.  122 minutes.  Focus Features. 

Atonement, director Joe Wright’s (Pride and Prejudice) devastating new film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, is the story of three lives destroyed by a malicious childhood lie that irrevocably seals the fate of two sisters and the man they both loved. It is also the crown jewel of movies this year, a magnificent drama of loss and regret that fires on all cylinders with a top-notch script and directing, stunning performances, memorable cinematography and a ravishing score that make this intimate epic a film for the ages.

Scripted by Christopher Hampton, Atonement opens during a humid Summer on the English countryside in 1935, amidst a web of unspoken attractions and pubescent imaginings as precocious thirteen-year-old playwright Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) begins to observe the flowering desire between older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and family gardener Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), for whom she also harbors a secret crush. The privileged Tallis family languishes in comfort while less fortunate Robbie, his education funded by his wealthy employers, plans to study medicine.

The family has also taken in abandoned teen cousin Lola (Juno Temple) and her younger twin brothers (Felix von Simpson, Charlie von Simpson), while older Tallis brother Leon (Patrick Kennedy) returns for a visit, accompanied by a grandiose mate (Benedict Cumberpatch), who takes an immediate liking to adolescent Lola.

Cecilia and Robbie harbor budding feelings for each other that cross class boundaries, their chaste garden flirting silently observed by fanciful Briony in a series of scenes where Knightley and McAvoy expertly tip toe around each other, emotions close to the vest. When Robbie ventures to confess his affections for Cecilia in letter, hand-delivered by young Briony, a mix-up sets fate in motion, giving her license to feverishly embellish his true intentions.

Up to this point, Atonement has been a mysterious coming-of-age puzzle, laced with a sort of perverse and rising eroticism as seen through young Briony’s eyes. Director Wright superbly structures the film around her misguided perceptions, replaying curious scenes we’ve witnessed through her naivete to clarify what she—and we—believe has occurred, only to reveal the factual circumstances of the misconstrued events. There’s an innocent scene by a fountain inadvertently sexualized. And a heated library encounter choreographed in an awkward position, allowing Briony to deduce the worst of something she is too young to comprehend.

By the time the twins have gone missing and search parties are canvassing the darkened countryside, this adolescent hotbed of jealousy and misperceptions leads to a whopper of a lie. Fumbling around the darkened hillside, Briony happens upon the shadowy sexual attack on cousin Lola. While the perpetrator’s identity is perfectly clear to us, she deliberately orchestrates a case against innocent Robbie, promptly imprisoned before being sprung into the trenches of WWII nearly four years later.

Robbie never loses hope that he will one day return to marry his beloved, even while the spoils of war taint his optimism, staged by director Wright with grim poignancy. There’s no gunplay here, rather, McAvoy reacts to the aftermath of battle, from a field of dead girls that leaves him awash in tears to a galvanic sequence where Wright stages a literal cast of a thousand soldiers amidst the melee of a beach at Dunkirk, accomplished in a superbly-staged, five-minute single take.

Back in London, eighteen-year-old Briony (an excellent Romola Garai) forgoes Cambridge to take up nursing amidst the blitz in an effort to wash the blood from her own hands, immobilized by the consequences of her childhood lie that has left her stricken with guilt. She attempts to atone for her transgressions by writing an apologia and in a powerful scene, pays an impromptu visit to sister Cecilia only to be met with bitter scorn by a shattered Knightley and McAvoy.

Knightley is fetching, then wearied as tragic Cecilia, cut off from her family and pining for love lost. She excels in the film’s early scenes, making it clear that Cecilia is aware of her own accidental, erotic power over Robbie, while realizing he holds the power over her heart. In a classic scene of wartime romantic tragedy, the scarred pair meets briefly, much later, in a restaurant. There is no joy, and the feeling of loss the pair conveys is palpable. She touches his hand. After a moment, he pulls away and tears up. This is grand movie acting, and both stars pierce the heart. As emotionally precise as Knightley is here, the film belongs to the magnificent McAvoy, making good on the promise of The Last King of Scotland and this year’s overlooked Becoming Jane.  His Robbie is intensely likeable, and his optimism turned to rage at a senselessly wasted life ranks in the year’s best work.

And then there is the haunting final scene, a storytelling masterstroke that redefines the entire film. Aged, dying Briony (Vanessa Redgrave), a successful author speaking for the first time about the event that defined her life and the subject of her new book, still attempts to atone, decades later, for her mistake. In a master class of acting over a few short minutes, Redgrave closes the film with a moving rumination on the relationship between art and life, regret and redemption.

Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography is alternately intimate and sprawling, equally effective at charting the light and shadow of the Tallis household and gleaming Summer countryside as the ravaged, large-scale backdrop of war-torn Britain. And the score, by Dario Marianelli, cleverly uses the minimal sound of typewriter keys as instruments during the initial sequences and builds to an epic crescendo of romantic loss in its later passages.

The heart of the film is, simply, a story that dares to imagine the death of love. Atonement is a masterpiece, and the best film of 2007.    

-Lee Shoquist