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Let the guilty bury the innocent

An often too-faithful filming of a gripping novel
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 6th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Suddenly, one summer. Saoirse Ronan and James McAvoy before the crimes.
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Atonement

Directed by Joe Wright
With James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Blethyn, Saoirse Ronan and Harriet Walter

Can one ever truly atone? It’s the question that runs through the latter part of Ian McEwan’s excellent if uneven novel Atonement, and its film version.
The unadorned answer is no, not really. Forgiveness exists, and can ameliorate one’s guilt. But if there’s no one left to offer it, what then? Even for those who haven’t quite abandoned scapegoats or crucifixions, is ritual atonement ever truly sufficient?
On the hottest day of the year in mid-1930s Surrey, a crime is committed among the landed gentry, and then a greater crime to conceal it. On the Tallis family’s estate, 13-year-old Briony Tallis is writing a play. She’s a precocious girl whose enthusiasm for words often overwhelms the words’ meanings (in both the novel and film, the romantic protagonist in Briony’s play will “evanesce” to Eastbourne).
A comical twisting of words by a child, however, will come to drive a tragedy. It’s also through words, more correctly and plainly defined, that Briony will, in old age, seek solace for what she once did.
Briony’s sister, Cecilia, has graduated from Cambridge, and is back home, as is Robbie Turner, the intellectual son of the Tallis’ cook, whom Mr. Tallis put through Cambridge. There’s an uneasiness between Cecilia and Robbie, which both fear to analyze. Then, in a moment by a fountain, things become clearer for them. But they become murky for Briony, who watches them from an upstairs window and misunderstands the scene.
That evening, there’s a dinner party for Briony’s brother, Leon, and his friend, a chocolate magnate. Leon has also invited Robbie, against Cecilia’s confused wishes. In a moment of haste before the party, Robbie writes Cecilia a note explaining his feelings for her. He also, as a private joke, writes a note that’s more erotic — “anatomical,” as Cecilia will later say. Robbie mistakenly sends this, rather than the intended letter. He compounds his error by handing the message to Briony to deliver, and she reads it.
By now Briony’s active imagination is costuming Robbie as a dangerous man. When Briony’s young cousin Lola is later found raped, the young playwright will decide which guest must be cast as the villain.
Cecilia and Robbie have only one stolen moment together, before fate and its agent, Briony, part them. Atonement follows the anguished search by the two lovers for each other, and of Briony’s eventual, guilt-ridden understanding of what her words have cost.
It’s a substantial story, and the first quarter of McEwan’s novel is breathtaking for the tension (sexual and otherwise) that’s created. Joe Wright’s very (perhaps too) faithful film accomplishes that as well. But then both the book and film drop Briony, and the immediate aftermath of the crime, to follow the British Expeditionary Force’s retreat to Dunkirk in the first days of World War II.
Robbie is there, trying to redeem himself by joining the army after being imprisoned on false accusations. On the brutal escape march to the English Channel, a wounded Robbie will witness the horror of the war’s first act. What sustains him is his faith in Cecilia’s love. Sadly, this doesn’t quite sustain the narrative.
Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton have found some ingenious ways of folding the past into this portion of the story to provide some narrative arc — though with a remote in one’s hands, it would be tempting to fast-forward on to Briony, as it was to thumb pages ahead with the novel. Not out of any great love for linearity, but for the fact that McEwan has so compellingly set the stage for Briony’s painful gaining of wisdom.  
The acting is beautifully understated, with Keira Knightley, playing Cecilia, standing out in her first really mature role. She’s matched by James McAvoy’s moving performance as the tragic Robbie. It’s become a joy to seek out McAvoy’s work, which is always surprising for its raw honesty. Interestingly, Wright often focuses on McAvoy’s hands, which are as capable of registering conflicting emotions as any other actor’s eyes.
There are three Brionys: The marvelous young Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai as Briony at 18, and Vanessa Redgrave as a graver, wiser old woman.
In Redgrave’s scene at the film’s end, Wright and Hampton better McEwan. Where the author has Briony being honored with a family-filled birthday party for her 77 years, the film isolates the now-famed, though dying, author in a television interview. Her final attempt at atonement seems better framed as a solitary figure, one very much left with her ghosts before a camera’s pitiless eye.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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