ATONEMENT ssss Directed by Joe Wright adapted by Christopher Hampton from a novel by Ian McEwen With James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Saoirse Ronan, and Vanessa Redgrave
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There’s an old saw in the movie business that great novels yield mediocre movies (like The Great Gatsby) while mediocre novels can be turned into great ones (like The Godfather). Atonement is the rare exception, a fine novel that, with modest alterations, has been translated into a fine movie. Screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, The Quiet American) and director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice) have smartly dramatized the book’s human conflict and convincingly realized its historical landscape. But the story’s first half, which maps the relations between a British family and its houseguests as a scandal unfolds over two days in 1935, loses a noticeable amount of McEwen’s social detail and emotional insight; the second half, which picks up five years later in the midst of the Battle of Dunkirk, is often more focused and powerful on the screen than on the page. This points up the real difference between the two forms: the novelist’s best friend is a character at rest, while the filmmaker’s best friend is a character in action.
Colliding with this unspoken passion is Cecilia’s 13-year-old sister, Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a willful child and aspiring writer who badly misunderstands what’s going on between the two adults. From a second-floor window she glimpses a particularly charged flirtation in which Cecilia angrily strips down to her slip and dives into a fountain to retrieve a shard from a vase Robbie has broken. Later in the day Robbie asks Briony to deliver a sealed note of apology to Cecilia. The little girl opens the letter, finding not the intended note but a vulgar confession of lust that Robbie has written in jest and meant to destroy. The coup de grace comes just before dinner, when Briony happens into a darkened room and catches Robbie and Cecilia finally consummating their desire. When the sisters’ visiting teenage cousin is raped later that night, Briony convinces herself that Robbie is the culprit, and her false testimony sends him to prison.
The movie fully honors the romance and tragedy of McEwen’s novel, but in the end the book is most fascinating for its self-reflexiveness: as a writer, young Briony is preoccupied with the same interiority that gives the novelist his special power. “Was everyone else really as alive as she was?” McEwen writes. “For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?” In this regard, the scene Briony witnesses between Robbie and Cecilia at the fountain proves revelatory: “She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view…. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive.” Briony’s sudden insight explains as well as anything why the novel as a form has endured for nearly four centuries: no silver screen can rival the ones we carry inside our own heads.v
