It's easy to forget to what extent violence, CGI animation, foul language and tawdry sex dominate the movie industry. Easy, until movies like Atonement come along and remind us that films still can and should be invested in gorgeous scenery, complex, thoughtful storytelling and unselfish, profoundly believable acting from young talent.
Atonement, based on the novel by Ian McEwan, tells several stories which revolve around Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old aspiring writer living in England just before the onset of WWII. Young Briony, played startlingly well by Saoirse Ronan, witnesses glimpses of the love affair between her older sister Cecilia, (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy). These voyeuristic peeks into a world of love and (not tawdry) sex that Briony doesn't yet understand lead her later to accuse Robbie of a heinous crime he did not commit.
The film manages to be at times a crime thriller, a romance and a war film while never betraying any of the genres or seeming out of line in its shifts. The actors serving the subplot of the film's crime, Juno Temple and Benedict Cumberbatch, are each excellent - Temple plays the precocious young victim aptly named Lola and Cumberbatch's Mitchell nears being over the top in his pedophilia but instead hits the creepy nail on its repulsive head. The only real cause for acting complaint are Lola's twin brothers, played by Charlie and Peter von Simpson, who, though humorous at times, seemed as though they were reading cue cards just off camera. However, their lesser talent could be simply in comparison to the enormous skill of the other child actors in the film.
As captivating as the crime committed may be, the true stars of the film are the young lovers Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis. The film, directed by Joe Wright who also directed Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, is something of a departure for the actress. True, she is a young woman in love, but here she carries herself as someone older, less impetuous and at times even mysterious. In short, with Atonement, Knightley has successfully left girlish roles behind and is now established as a powerful leading woman.
McAvoy, too, is utterly disarming as Knightley's love interest. His vulnerable yet playful Robbie is difficult not to fall in love with, a statement true of Knightley's Cecilia as well. Therein lies the real achievment of Wright and screenplay writer Christopher Hampton - Robbie and Cecilia may not have much time to fall in love, but the audience has already fallen for each of them separately, thus making it obvious that they belong together. Their relationship, though brief, is endowed with enough fire to convincingly burn the entire film, a credit to great directing, acting and writing.
But Atonement is also an astonishingly good war epic as well. The hospital scene between 18-year-old Briony (Romola Garai) and Luc (Jérémie Renier) depicts, more than any bloody, computer-enhanced battle scene, the agony of war. And the highest high of the film must be Wright's depiction of the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk. Running almost five minutes, this single, steady shot of the defeated British soldiers waiting to be ferried home used real actors as extras, an actual destroyed sailboat for a prop and a movie house to film the scene. Though it cost over $1 million to shoot, the grandeur of the scene is reason enough to see the film and evidence that sometimes doing things the old-fashioned way is worth the effort.
It is that feeling of old-fashioned romance that pervades the film through all its genres, and the quiet sense of tragedy that runs throughout the various aspects of the film which keeps us enraptured through some admittedly long segments following Robbie through France. It also makes the transition to the modern day late in the film so effectively jarring. We are brought to an elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) and come to realize that Atonement has really been a movie about writing as well as love and war. Much of the score is based around the clicks of a typewriter, Cecilia and Robbie first make love in a library and in the final twist, the film is a book (which, of course, it actually is).
Constant images of water and references to writing come to bear as we learn that Atonement is asking us basic questions about the nature of mistakes and what it takes to rectify them. And most importantly can writing, if it's all we have to remember the past, become truth?
While Atonement may not leave us with a simple answer it does linger long after the theater lights wink on. As a romance, war epic and whodunit, the film stands unparalleled by any movie in recent memory. Those elements coupled with the questions of art and sheer beauty of the movie make it not only a shoo-in for Academy Award nominations but something like a modern-day classic.
