AML Movie Review: “Atonement”

The promise of a great period piece movie with Keira Knightley, directed by Joe Wright who did Pride and Prejudice and being nominated for seven Golden Globes proved to be slightly over-hyped.

I tend to really get into these kind of movies. Sense & Sensibility, Gosford Park, Emma, etc., are all appealing in how they portray different cultures in history.

Atonement fits that bill slightly, but is a lot more modern in nature in that it’s set in 1935 and beyond during World War II. You have some great acting here by Knightley, and also James McAvoy, from the Last King of Scotland.

The movie can essentially be broken up into three parts, although the last one I wont give away. Suffice it to say, the first third of the movie is very good, but then it wanders and loses its way.

McAvoy plays Robbie Turner, a young man in love with Cicilia Tallis, becomes trapped in a lie by Cicila’s younger sister, Briony, who also has a crush of sorts on Robbie. She witnesses a passionate exchange between Robbie and Cicilia and loses her mind a little bit.

When a young girl on the Tallis estate is raped, Briony blames Robbie. Her imagination is vivid and her jealousy apparent, she makes a horrible decision which will haunt her the rest of her life.

With Robbie off to Jail, Cicila leaves home, never wanting to speak to her sister or family again. She becomes a nurse to help the wounded in the war, while Robbie ends up a soldier when given the choice between staying in prison or fighting.

This is where Atonement starts to wander a bit for me. The first third was a great story and pretty intense, with some surprising moments and amazing acting. But once the war hits and you see how Robbie and Cicilia reconnect, the film loses what it had going.

And I’m sort of shocked really, because the number of nominations and all the good press this film is getting promised a lot more.

One of the problems I saw was that this was a story about love and reconciliation, but we were given a lot of stuff about the war that I felt took away from the whole point. Yes, we know Briony’s lie caused Robbie massive pain at being in prison, but wouldn’t he have fought in the war anyways? He was a young man and to me, it seems likely he would have been drafted or signed up to help fight.

So showing his pain at being separated from Cicilia because of the war just didn’t hold a lot of water for me.

Now, I will give one scene a lot of props here. If you saw Children of Men, you’ll remember a long sequence in the film when they are trying to cross a town amidst fighting and explosions. It lasts almost 10 minutes, never breaks or switches cameras and is one long, continuous shot that takes you from a street filled with tanks and soldiers, into a house and up a few floors.

It was brilliant and one of the many things I loved about that film.

Atonement also has one of these remarkable continuous shots, this time a scene in which Robbie walks down a beach and up into a city where his countrymen are awaiting ships to take them home. It had to have lasted 8-10 minutes and it must have been painstaking to setup.

To me me this is the kind of movie that wins a lot of awards because people love artsy and beautifully shot films, regardless of whether or not they actually hold your interest or tell a wonderful story. Even my wife started yawning a bit during it, and she LOVES this stuff.

It’s the exact type of movie the Academy loves and it will likely win many awards and maybe an Oscar or two.

Once you get to the final “act” of the film, you may think back and wonder what actually happened to lead up to this and why did it take so long? What did I see in the middle of this film that really mattered?

The movie is really about Briony and her “atonement” of that horrible lie she told, but you get too much “other” stuff that gets in the way.

Beautifully shot, great acting, but just a slightly off for me. There were so many other movies in 2007 that brought emotion out of me, but this one felt flat.

AML Rating: B