Atonement (2007) Review

A girl misreads something she sees from a window, then reads something she was not meant to read, then tells a lie about a third thing. Two lives are destroyed and the film spends two hours on the consequences before revealing what it has been doing.

The reveal is not a twist in the conventional sense. Nothing is unmasked and nobody is who they were not. What changes is the category of the thing.

Ian McEwan’s novel achieves its effect through prose that admits at the end to being fiction, which is a move available in a book and not in a film. Christopher Hampton and Joe Wright had to find another one.

The 8 is for an adaptation that solves a genuinely hard structural problem and for a middle section that is beautiful and slow enough to lose people. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are good instead of remarkable. The three actors playing Briony, and Vanessa Redgrave in particular, are the film.

The Reveal Reclassifies Everything

In the last ten minutes an elderly Briony, being interviewed about her final novel, explains that the ending you have just watched did not happen. Robbie died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes before the evacuation. Cecilia was killed in the Balham tube flooding. They never saw each other again.

The reunion, the seaside cottage, the confrontation in the flat where Briony apologizes and agrees to recant, all of it was written by her, because she could not give them anything else.

That converts the entire film from a tragedy into an act of authorship. Everything you found moving in the last hour was a confession dressed as a happy ending.

The cruelty is precise. She gave them what she took, in the only medium where she had the power to give it, and the film makes you feel the gift before telling you it is fictional. You are made complicit in the consolation.

Redgrave plays it entirely without self-pity, which is what makes it land. She is not asking forgiveness and does not think the novel earns her any. She says plainly that she is dying, that she will not publish while the family survives, and that the lovers deserved better than she could give them.

What is unbearable is the small detail that the flat scene never happened, so Robbie never got to say any of the things he says in it. Briony wrote his anger for him too.

Why Briony Lies

The film is careful to make the lie comprehensible without making it forgivable, which is a narrow line.

She is thirteen. She sees a scene at a fountain she cannot interpret, reads a note that was never meant to be sent and contains a word she has no context for, and then walks in on something in a library. Each event is genuinely ambiguous to a child and she assembles them into a theory.

The theory is also a story, and she is a novelist already. The film establishes this in the first scene, with her completed play and her insistence on staging it, and she has the writer’s instinct for the version with the cleanest shape.

So when she is asked, repeatedly, by adults who want a name, she gives one. She does not invent the assault. She supplies a certainty she does not have, and nobody in authority questions a child who is that composed.

Class is the mechanism that makes it stick. Robbie is the housekeeper’s son whose education the Tallis family paid for, and the accusation lands on somebody the household was already prepared to believe it of. Paul Marshall, the chocolate heir who did it, is not considered.

Briony’s older self does not claim confusion. She says she knew, or came to know, and did nothing for years because she was frightened, which is a much worse and more honest account than being mistaken.

The Dunkirk Shot

A single unbroken take, a little over five minutes, following Robbie and two soldiers across the beach at Bray Dunes past a Ferris wheel, a bandstand with a choir singing, men shooting horses, a boat being burned, a cinema still running.

It was shot in Redcar with roughly a thousand extras, and they got three complete takes before the light went, with the third one in the film. Wright has said the second take is the one used and that the first had a technical failure.

It has been criticized as showing off, and it is doing something specific. Robbie is not experiencing the retreat as a sequence of events, he is moving through it in one exhausted uninterrupted stretch, and any cut would give the audience a rest he is not getting.

It also puts everything in the same frame without ranking it. A choir and a slaughtered horse and a fairground ride occupy the same shot at the same priority, which is what a beach in collapse would look like, and no montage could achieve it.

The choir singing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind is the detail that stops it being a technical exercise. Men who are about to die are singing a hymn about restraint and quietness, and the camera passes them without stopping.

Robbie dies of an infected wound the following morning, offscreen, having said almost nothing about it. The shot is the last thing he does.

The Typewriter

Dario Marianelli’s score uses a typewriter as a percussion instrument from the opening scene, before you know that writing is the subject of the film.

It starts as diegetic sound, Briony typing her play, and then the rhythm continues under the strings after she stops. By the middle of the film the typewriter is part of the orchestra and nobody has drawn attention to it.

That is the film telling you what it is about in the first minute, in a register the audience registers without processing. By the end the typewriter has become the instrument of both the crime and the restitution, which is a considerable amount of work for a piece of office equipment.

It won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, and it is one of the neatest pieces of thematic scoring I know of. Almost nobody notices it on a first viewing, which is the correct outcome.

The other formal choice is that the film shows the fountain scene twice, once from Briony’s window and once from ground level, and only the second version contains the information.

Wright puts the audience in her position first and then corrects them, which is a small structural rehearsal for what the ending does at scale.

What the Adaptation Solves

The novel’s ending works because the prose has been the problem all along. McEwan writes the first two thirds in a slightly heightened literary style, and the final section reveals that the style was Briony’s, so the reader has been inside the novel she wrote without knowing it.

Film has no equivalent. You cannot make an image style-attributable to a character in the same way, and the obvious solutions are all bad: voiceover, a framing device announced up front, on-screen text.

Hampton and Wright’s answer is to hold the reveal until an interview scene and to have Briony deliver it directly to camera, in a documentary register the film has not used before. The change of form does what the change of prose does in the book.

It is not as elegant as the novel and it is close, which is about the best an adaptation of that particular trick could manage.

The other solution is the repeated fountain scene and a handful of moments staged with slight artificiality, which read as ordinary period-film gloss on a first viewing and as Briony’s invention on a second.

McEwan was closely involved and has been complimentary about it, which is not always the case and is worth something.

Should you watch Atonement?

Yes, and know that the middle is slow on purpose and that the last ten minutes are the reason. If you have already seen it, watch the first act again for how much of it is staged as somebody’s writing instead of as events. And read the novel, because the two solve the same problem differently and both solutions are worth having.

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