Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Things
Fall Apart
(Atonement, 1/21/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
While little sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan)watches from
a mansion window, big sister (Keira Knightley) shares an erotically-charged
moment with the son of a servant (James McAvoy). 13 year-old Briony
draws the wrong conclusions about the nature of the encounter, which
lead to misunderstandings in the family. These, in turn, cause no end
of trouble for the unlucky lovers.
This kind of premise seems best
suited for sex farces set among Britain's quince jam-and-jodhpurs class.
Such boudoir comedies are typically rounded off by a "did I happen
to mention ...?" exculpatory revelation and a big marriage scene.
What is perhaps the most surprising about the Ian McEwan novel Atonement
is that it takes this slim idea in a deathly serious direction. Instead
of the tribulations of love, McEwan wants to explore the destructive
power of making fiction—in its most anti-social guise, lying—and
its paradoxical power to redeem as well.
Full disclosure: I haven't read
the book. I've seen Joe Wright's movie, however, and based on it I can't
necessarily applaud the gambit. Wright's adaptation of Atonement
is an unsettled, unsatisfying piece of work—a film that tries to
combine the prestige of Masterpiece Theatre with po-mo literary
self-consciousness, yet seems ashamed of the first and reluctant to
invest much in the second.
There seem to be at least four embryonic
vestiges of other stories stuck inside Atonement's ungainly body.
The opening tableau, set in 1935, is a tense and increasingly awkward
bedroom farce about Briony's unfounded accusations of rape against the
object of her frustrated desire, Robbie (McAvoy). The second jumps ahead
a few years, when Britain is under German air attack and Robbie is stranded
at Dunkirk with the rest of the British Army. The third jumps ahead
still farther, when a grown-up Briony (Romola Garai)realizes the effect
of her misapprehension and tries to patch it up with her sister and
Robbie. The fourth introduces Vanessa Redgrave as the contemporary Briony,
who has become a famous novelist but still smarts with guilt over mistakes
done decades before.
How the last thread relates to #1
and #3 need not be divulged. #4 does feel like a makeshift device, though—a
kind of Vanessa ex machina that talks a resolution into the camera
without dramatizing it. #2 is the most visually impressive, including
an masterful tracking shot over the beach in northern France where hundreds
of thousands of British soldiers wait for rescue or annihilation. The
absurdity of the scene (some Tommies sunbath, some ride the carousel,
some grease themselves for a long swim across the channel) rivals parts
of Apocalypse Now in its desperate, flat-out insanity. There's
also no conceivable way this has anything to do with the rest of the
film.
Now this writer is not too innocent
to suspect why the wartime spectacle was shoehorned into this movie:
it gives Atonement its bona fides as the kind of historical
epic that wins Oscars for Best Picture. Similar can be said for romantic
shots of its willowly heroine posed against the white cliffs of Dover.
True, that kind of stuff worked like a charm in Wright's last film,
Pride & Prejudice (2005). Perhaps the difference is that
in that case Jane Austen (and Wright) was not trying to tell a story
and deconstruct it at the same time. The day I need Vanessa Redgrave
to explain the appeal of a windswept Keira Knightley is the day I give
up quince jam, jodhpurs, and anything else good in life.
Granted, there are interesting ideas
on the minds of the people who made Atonement. To believe they
succeed in expressing them here, though, is to be more credulous than
Briony herself.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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