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I'm not sure how well Atonement works as an adaptation seeing as how I haven't read the book, but also seeing as how my focus on the movie was located largely on the mechanics of storytelling. I loved the use of sound, light and color. Atonement, the movie, was distractingly visual.
Atonement is, at its heart, a story about stories. Stories as memory, stories as lies, stories as perspective. Divided into three sections, Atonement tracks the repercussions of a lie (a story) told by Briony Tallis, a somewhat spoiled 13 year-old at the movie's opening. The second section deals with a movement towards recovery by the victims of Briony's lie, her sister Cecilia (Kiera Knightly) and Cecilia's lover Robbie (James McAvoy), and Briony's pursuit of atonement. The final section is a brief revelation about Briony, (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) a successful 77 year-old novelist, and the events of that long ago summer on "the hottest day of the year."
We're introduced to Briony typing away in a room filled with light and washed out pastels. It's a girl's room, white and pristine except for the mess of scattered toys abandoned on the floor in front of a doll's house. In the opening and closing sections of the movie Briony is depicted as an active and engaged character with the middle section revealing a very passive and static figure. There's a reason for the dissonance that is revealed at the movie's close and that, for me, falls kinda flat.
The movie also does alot of staging and we are hit over the head with visuals telling us how we should understand the story. Briony in that opening scene is very carefully staged, writing a play, typing 'the end' and then she's up and moving. She's a writer and we are immediately introduced to the idea that she creates stories. There's also the fountain scene between C and Robbie, first viewed through a closed window and with a bee buzzing hysterically against the glass. The plot of that exchange generated by Briony's feverish imagination is nothing like what actually occurs.
"The Making Of" featurette included on the DVD discusses Briony's activity, the dynamic camera movement and the way that Briony drags the camera (and the viewer) with her. We spend a great deal of the opening of the film at Briony's back, following her and watching the world from over her shoulder. In retrospect, it sets up rather elegantly a visual parallel of the conundrum in which Briony finds herself. Although we see what Briony sees, it is a limited perspective as the landscape is perpetually blocked by Briony's body. We realize then that our entre into this world, our vision of it, is flawed first as it is filtered through Briony's spoiled, jealous gaze and again as it is filtered past (or through) Briony's physical body.
We are meant to see what she sees, but also to understand that she doesn't really comprehend what she sees. We are given clues throughout, bits of dialogue, alternate perspectives to indicate this, as well as to reveal that there is more than one string of plot unraveling within the house that will ultimately collide. Briony's focus is taken up with Robbie and Cecilia and, therefore, it is the main focus of the story and our limited understanding of the story. However, there are secondary and tertiary plots revolving most explicitly around a visiting cousin, Lola Quincey, Briony and Cecilia's brother's visiting guest, Paul Marshall, and a servant. Although, we see the threads of aggressive and sexual tension wound between the latter three, it isn't clear that Briony sees it despite Lola coming to her later in the nursery to confide that she has been raped. We, the viewer, understand what Lola is trying to say but never articulates. However, Briony is obsessed with her jealously over Robbie's attraction to Cecilia and has misinterpreted (or perhaps intentionally re-scripted)that attraction as some sort of threat to Cecilia.
Briony's status as an unreliable narrator undermines everything that she purports to know for almost all but the very remainder of the film. Romola Garai plays a very passive, skittish and remorseful Briony in the second segment of the movie and we can’t help but wonder what she truly remembers of that night, what she is intentionally forgetting, and what she’s unintentionally making up.
Unlike Cecilia, perpetually shot in light, Briony inhabits a darker world from the beginning. She lurks in hallways and at windows. The hospital she later works at is full of shadows. The nursery is transformed from a child's haven into a location for the sharing of horrible adult secrets.
The interior of the house is largely dark and heavily shadowed. There are places where light dominates, the study and the kitchen, but those are places where Cecilia lingers. Athough we begin the story with Briony as our innocent (the use of light in her bedroom and later the nursery where her cousins are staying), she shifts rather easily into the darker (adult) sphere, a space that the older Cecilia inhabits only once when Robbie arrives at the house and she is framed in the entryway by the door and the shadow's of the house's interior and again in the library during their tête-à-tête.
The moment of The Betrayal is a combination of what Briony thinks she sees, what she wants to see and what she thinks that she understands. She's already caught Robbie and Cecilia in the library having sex up against the book case and Briony has interpreted this, we later discover, as an assault. A visiting cousin is then discovered by Briony in the midst of being raped. Her assailant runs and Briony imagines that it is Robbie. Of course, Robbie being who he is, is easily convicted and arrested. I found it interesting that he is also the one, having been gone the longest, who actually turns up with the missing boys. The complicity that exists between the two girls, Briony and Lola, that allows Robbie to be marked as the assailant and then hauled away is terrible and tragic.
The second part of the film deals with Robbie's life in the army, his reunion with Cecilia and Briony's life as a nurse. She's seeking redemption -- serving the wounded and dying. There are markers here, too, that would seem to suggest to us that we be wary about the story we're being told. A solider with a brain injury mistakes Briony for someone else and the conversation that they have revolves around a relationship eerily similar to the triangle and events that have marked Briony, Cecilia and Robbie.
The room is full of shadows and the solider is being kept cordoned off from the others by a curtain of bright red. Washed out nighttime hues of black, grey and blue are startlingly cut by that curtain as if, like M. Knight Shayamalyan, we are being entreated to pay extra close attention to the significance of this man and this conversation.
Later Briony finds Cecilia and Robbie who are lovers once again. Briony begs forgiveness which Robbie is totally unwilling to grant. Briony, we imagine, believes that she is totally due this hatred and collapses with the certain relief that he seems to hate her as much as he does. She's a rather still and passive character. The agency of her youth seems to have drained away to the pale, withdrawn adult Briony. Cecilia's room is again, full of half-light. She's still more brightly lit than her guilty sister.
The segment continues with Robbie away at war and it is the most poignant section. It's an odd crash-up of the surreal and hyper-real. A grotesque mélange of solders run amok, disciplined regiments running drills, patriotism, ennui, depression and the absurd. It is a scene of utter and complete chaos. It's from this point forward that we begin to doubt Robbie's sanity and perception. As he wanders into a house and meets a woman who washes his feet for him. He tells her about Cecilia who loves him and is waiting. There is a crazy saturated light and, again, loads of red in the color scheme that suggest something is amiss. When Robbie stumbles out again, he is very ill and his companion asks him about his feet. In retrospect, I imagined that Robbie was suffering from trench foot, a rather common ailment of solders in WWI.
The closing section of the movie reveals an aged Briony (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) being interviewed about her soon to be released book, Atonement. Over the course of the interview she reveals two very crucial things: 1. that the narrative of the book is a conflation of true and imagined events because although the events of the summer were real enough, both Cecilia and Robbie died before they were ever reunited and 2. Briony has been diagnosed with vascular dementia, a disease that, like Alzheimer's, affects memory.
I felt a little cheated by these revelations, although considering the point of the film itself, I suppose it makes sense. I have never been a fan of the "oh, it was all a dream" plot and Atonement does nothing to change my opinion of the literary ruse. I do suppose that if I were to re-watch the film, that there would be hints littered throughout to suggest what's really occurring. There are a few places that I found suspect in the first go-round.
Unfortunately, knowing that Briony's mental facilities are also being slowly eroded by disease, the events of the film are even more questionable despite the fact that she tells us that the novel was begun a very long time ago. It was in fact, her first novel written. Well, now we're faced with the faulty memory of an especially imaginative child and an adult with a disease of the mind writing a story intended to repair a relationship and to honor the people she hurt most. The only thing that we do know for sure, in the end, is that Cecelia died in October of 1940 during the Balham tube disaster during The Blitz and that Robbie died of septicemia on the last day of the evacuation at Dunkirk on June 1st of 1940.
There were so many tells and hints and nudges throughout the film that I knew pretty early on that I should be "looking" for something. My ability, or perhaps willingness, to just relax and enjoy the movie was compromised as a result and at this point I can't say for certain if I actually *liked* the film. I was too busy being distracted by the things that I felt should mean something or hint at something. Unfortunately, it was late and I didn't really bother to figure it all out, although the impetus was there. I’ll have to go back and see it again.
Atonement is, at its heart, a story about stories. Stories as memory, stories as lies, stories as perspective. Divided into three sections, Atonement tracks the repercussions of a lie (a story) told by Briony Tallis, a somewhat spoiled 13 year-old at the movie's opening. The second section deals with a movement towards recovery by the victims of Briony's lie, her sister Cecilia (Kiera Knightly) and Cecilia's lover Robbie (James McAvoy), and Briony's pursuit of atonement. The final section is a brief revelation about Briony, (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) a successful 77 year-old novelist, and the events of that long ago summer on "the hottest day of the year."
We're introduced to Briony typing away in a room filled with light and washed out pastels. It's a girl's room, white and pristine except for the mess of scattered toys abandoned on the floor in front of a doll's house. In the opening and closing sections of the movie Briony is depicted as an active and engaged character with the middle section revealing a very passive and static figure. There's a reason for the dissonance that is revealed at the movie's close and that, for me, falls kinda flat.
The movie also does alot of staging and we are hit over the head with visuals telling us how we should understand the story. Briony in that opening scene is very carefully staged, writing a play, typing 'the end' and then she's up and moving. She's a writer and we are immediately introduced to the idea that she creates stories. There's also the fountain scene between C and Robbie, first viewed through a closed window and with a bee buzzing hysterically against the glass. The plot of that exchange generated by Briony's feverish imagination is nothing like what actually occurs.
"The Making Of" featurette included on the DVD discusses Briony's activity, the dynamic camera movement and the way that Briony drags the camera (and the viewer) with her. We spend a great deal of the opening of the film at Briony's back, following her and watching the world from over her shoulder. In retrospect, it sets up rather elegantly a visual parallel of the conundrum in which Briony finds herself. Although we see what Briony sees, it is a limited perspective as the landscape is perpetually blocked by Briony's body. We realize then that our entre into this world, our vision of it, is flawed first as it is filtered through Briony's spoiled, jealous gaze and again as it is filtered past (or through) Briony's physical body.
We are meant to see what she sees, but also to understand that she doesn't really comprehend what she sees. We are given clues throughout, bits of dialogue, alternate perspectives to indicate this, as well as to reveal that there is more than one string of plot unraveling within the house that will ultimately collide. Briony's focus is taken up with Robbie and Cecilia and, therefore, it is the main focus of the story and our limited understanding of the story. However, there are secondary and tertiary plots revolving most explicitly around a visiting cousin, Lola Quincey, Briony and Cecilia's brother's visiting guest, Paul Marshall, and a servant. Although, we see the threads of aggressive and sexual tension wound between the latter three, it isn't clear that Briony sees it despite Lola coming to her later in the nursery to confide that she has been raped. We, the viewer, understand what Lola is trying to say but never articulates. However, Briony is obsessed with her jealously over Robbie's attraction to Cecilia and has misinterpreted (or perhaps intentionally re-scripted)that attraction as some sort of threat to Cecilia.
Briony's status as an unreliable narrator undermines everything that she purports to know for almost all but the very remainder of the film. Romola Garai plays a very passive, skittish and remorseful Briony in the second segment of the movie and we can’t help but wonder what she truly remembers of that night, what she is intentionally forgetting, and what she’s unintentionally making up.
Unlike Cecilia, perpetually shot in light, Briony inhabits a darker world from the beginning. She lurks in hallways and at windows. The hospital she later works at is full of shadows. The nursery is transformed from a child's haven into a location for the sharing of horrible adult secrets.
The interior of the house is largely dark and heavily shadowed. There are places where light dominates, the study and the kitchen, but those are places where Cecilia lingers. Athough we begin the story with Briony as our innocent (the use of light in her bedroom and later the nursery where her cousins are staying), she shifts rather easily into the darker (adult) sphere, a space that the older Cecilia inhabits only once when Robbie arrives at the house and she is framed in the entryway by the door and the shadow's of the house's interior and again in the library during their tête-à-tête.
The moment of The Betrayal is a combination of what Briony thinks she sees, what she wants to see and what she thinks that she understands. She's already caught Robbie and Cecilia in the library having sex up against the book case and Briony has interpreted this, we later discover, as an assault. A visiting cousin is then discovered by Briony in the midst of being raped. Her assailant runs and Briony imagines that it is Robbie. Of course, Robbie being who he is, is easily convicted and arrested. I found it interesting that he is also the one, having been gone the longest, who actually turns up with the missing boys. The complicity that exists between the two girls, Briony and Lola, that allows Robbie to be marked as the assailant and then hauled away is terrible and tragic.
The second part of the film deals with Robbie's life in the army, his reunion with Cecilia and Briony's life as a nurse. She's seeking redemption -- serving the wounded and dying. There are markers here, too, that would seem to suggest to us that we be wary about the story we're being told. A solider with a brain injury mistakes Briony for someone else and the conversation that they have revolves around a relationship eerily similar to the triangle and events that have marked Briony, Cecilia and Robbie.
The room is full of shadows and the solider is being kept cordoned off from the others by a curtain of bright red. Washed out nighttime hues of black, grey and blue are startlingly cut by that curtain as if, like M. Knight Shayamalyan, we are being entreated to pay extra close attention to the significance of this man and this conversation.
Later Briony finds Cecilia and Robbie who are lovers once again. Briony begs forgiveness which Robbie is totally unwilling to grant. Briony, we imagine, believes that she is totally due this hatred and collapses with the certain relief that he seems to hate her as much as he does. She's a rather still and passive character. The agency of her youth seems to have drained away to the pale, withdrawn adult Briony. Cecilia's room is again, full of half-light. She's still more brightly lit than her guilty sister.
The segment continues with Robbie away at war and it is the most poignant section. It's an odd crash-up of the surreal and hyper-real. A grotesque mélange of solders run amok, disciplined regiments running drills, patriotism, ennui, depression and the absurd. It is a scene of utter and complete chaos. It's from this point forward that we begin to doubt Robbie's sanity and perception. As he wanders into a house and meets a woman who washes his feet for him. He tells her about Cecilia who loves him and is waiting. There is a crazy saturated light and, again, loads of red in the color scheme that suggest something is amiss. When Robbie stumbles out again, he is very ill and his companion asks him about his feet. In retrospect, I imagined that Robbie was suffering from trench foot, a rather common ailment of solders in WWI.
The closing section of the movie reveals an aged Briony (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) being interviewed about her soon to be released book, Atonement. Over the course of the interview she reveals two very crucial things: 1. that the narrative of the book is a conflation of true and imagined events because although the events of the summer were real enough, both Cecilia and Robbie died before they were ever reunited and 2. Briony has been diagnosed with vascular dementia, a disease that, like Alzheimer's, affects memory.
I felt a little cheated by these revelations, although considering the point of the film itself, I suppose it makes sense. I have never been a fan of the "oh, it was all a dream" plot and Atonement does nothing to change my opinion of the literary ruse. I do suppose that if I were to re-watch the film, that there would be hints littered throughout to suggest what's really occurring. There are a few places that I found suspect in the first go-round.
Unfortunately, knowing that Briony's mental facilities are also being slowly eroded by disease, the events of the film are even more questionable despite the fact that she tells us that the novel was begun a very long time ago. It was in fact, her first novel written. Well, now we're faced with the faulty memory of an especially imaginative child and an adult with a disease of the mind writing a story intended to repair a relationship and to honor the people she hurt most. The only thing that we do know for sure, in the end, is that Cecelia died in October of 1940 during the Balham tube disaster during The Blitz and that Robbie died of septicemia on the last day of the evacuation at Dunkirk on June 1st of 1940.
There were so many tells and hints and nudges throughout the film that I knew pretty early on that I should be "looking" for something. My ability, or perhaps willingness, to just relax and enjoy the movie was compromised as a result and at this point I can't say for certain if I actually *liked* the film. I was too busy being distracted by the things that I felt should mean something or hint at something. Unfortunately, it was late and I didn't really bother to figure it all out, although the impetus was there. I’ll have to go back and see it again.
