By Peter T. Chattaway

THE LESS you know about Atonement (opens December 7) going into the theatre, the richer and more rewarding an experience it will be. As it happens, the film is so complex, and touches on so many themes, it would be impossible to give away all that much about it in a short review anyway.

So consider this a spoiler-free taste of what’s to come.

Based on the acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan, the film concerns three people whose lives are irrevocably changed by an injustice. The story begins in 1935, when a 13 year old upper-class girl with a lively imagination named Briony (Saoirse Ronan) witnesses some puzzling, and almost certainly scandalous, interactions between her big sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and the gardener, Robbie (James McAvoy).

These moments are first presented to us from Briony’s point of view. They are then shown again, from Cecilia and Robbie’s point of view, and the contrast between these two perspectives underscores the differences in how children and adults see the world. It also prepares us for later moments in the film, when incidents we thought we understood are revealed to be even more complicated than we knew.

Before too long, Briony thinks she has witnessed something else, too – and so she makes an accusation against Robbie that ruins his life forever, and Cecilia’s too.

The film then jumps ahead five years, to World War II. Robbie, given the choice of prison or the army, is now a soldier stranded in France during the disastrous retreat at Dunkirk. Meanwhile, Cecilia and Briony (the latter now played by Romola Garai of Amazing Grace) are nurses in London – Cecilia because she loves Robbie and has cut off all ties to her family, Briony because she wants to do some kind of “penance” for the damage she has done. The two sisters do not associate with each other.

One of the striking things about this film is the way it emphasizes the role that both chance and choice play in determining our fates. Young Briony, for example, is drawn to a window because she hears a bee buzzing against it – and if it were not for that bee, she would not have witnessed the first of the puzzling incidents.

The film also probes the fuzzy line between fact and fancy in the way we remember things, and for that matter in the way we sometimes live in the present. Briony’s imagination may be partly to blame for the accusation she makes. And Robbie, more than once, thinks back to certain pivotal moments in his own life and wishes they could be undone. During a moment of delusional illness in France, he also imagines that his mother (Brenda Blethyn) has come to soothe and take care of him.

Much of the film revolves around the act of writing; even the musical score, by Dario Marianelli, makes frequent use of a manual typewriter’s clickety-clack. One early scene shows Robbie composing draft upon draft of a letter of apology to Cecilia.

Continue article >>

Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in Atonement

Similarly, Briony wants to be an author, and to atone for her error, she ultimately spends years writing and rewriting her version of what really happened.

It is difficult to say much more without giving away important plot points. But suffice it to say that the film, written for the screen by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons) and directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice), raises important questions about the relationship between honesty and kindness, between truth and grace.

In thinking about this film, my mind often goes back to Snow Falling on Cedars. Both films move back and forth in time, both films feature young lovers interrupted in a moment of passion, and both films amplify questions of personal, social and even cosmic injustice by dragging their characters into the Second World War.

But where Snow Falling on Cedars was about bearing your scars and letting go of the past, Atonement seems to be about people who cannot let go of the past, and are indeed haunted by the past and their knowledge that it can never be undone.

Briony, in particular, is searching for grace, and the fact that she can’t quite find it makes Atonement one of the more devastating, heart-breaking films in recent memory.

* * *

Juno (opens December 14) is quite possibly the best of the unplanned-pregnancy comedies that have come out this year. It is also the most explicit in its rejection of abortion.

The protagonist of this film, a high-school student played by Ellen Page, actually goes to a clinic to have her pregnancy terminated – but then she walks out, because something a pro-life activist said outside the clinic stuck in her brain.

It would be a stretch to say that this film – written by former stripper Diablo Cody and directed by Thank You for Smoking’s Jason Reitman – was made for social conservatives. Indeed, when all is said and done, neither Juno nor her child end up in a traditional family, as such.

But in a way, that just underscores the film’s implicit pro-life sensibility; life is life, no agenda-driven strings attached. And the fact that Juno matures quite nicely because she keeps her baby certainly doesn’t hurt.

– filmchatblog.blogspot.com

December 2007