Atonement
Directed by Joe Wright
If Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner were responding to cinema almost 100 years ago, what was the inspiration for Ian McEwan’s 1990s novel, Atonement? Director Joe Wright gives the game away in his film version of Atonement, a highly derivative prestige movie that makes a fetish of McEwan’s literary self-consciousness by translating it into the most fussy, pretentiously directed movie since Andrew Dominik’s Jesse James/Robert Ford.
This is worse because, at the movies, literary pretense is excessive. Every jump-cut, flashback, pirouetting camera gimmick is designed to represent some grandiloquent wordy pomposity. Designed to impress, not to be felt, Atonement exemplifies the British snobbery it pretends to critique. The story of Briony (Saoirse Ronan)—a rich teenage girl in 1935 England, whose careless lie ruins several people’s lives—is meant to show childhood innocence being corrupted by both the excesses of class and the mysteries of adult sexuality. But Innocence and Corruption are not the real subjects; Wright concentrates on the appreciation of innocence and corruption just as McEwan’s writing congratulates readers on their own good-taste appreciation of his sophistry.
Briony’s story never fulfills McEwan’s tragic outline because of Wright’s superficial emphasis on the classy concept. He directs with the overwrought enthusiasm of a true second-rater: giving a flamboyant mystique to the estate where Briony observes her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) flirting with the maid’s virile son Robbie (James McAvoy). Adding more portentousness, Wright nods to McEwan’s envy of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner by fracturing time and replaying enigmatic actions (a young woman slipping off clothes to dip into a fountain, a young man lighting a cigarette). He cues everything to an annoying soundtrack that mixes Dario Marianelli’s muzak with incessant clacking of typewriter keys. There’s gigantic close-ups of the typewriter characters as Robbie composes a risque love letter to Cecilia. In Wright’s shameless rip of Citizen Kane, the screen-filling “C-U-N-T” really is W-E-A-K.
Too soon after sketching Briony’s naiveté, Wright dispenses with her psychological portrait and jumps 10 years ahead into WWII. Robbie is displaced by the war, Cecilia suffers on the homefront and Briony (now played by Romola Garai) staggers through nursing duty in London. Briony’s character is no longer explored. Wright’s fancy, classy time-tricks neglect a more logical or honest presentation of the events that followed Briony’s betrayal. The entire story becomes a hysterical overreaction to adolescent confusion, leading to Wright’s show-offy digression on the meaningless cruelty of war. He films the British army evacuation at Dunkirk in one long, fluid take. One of those operatic apocalypses that Alfonso Cuarón staged in Children of Men—any pretentious director can do it, even with an ironic/iconic Ferris wheel in the background.
Done-in by his own self-importance, Wright overwhelms the story’s personal tragedy with extravagant depictions of his love triangle’s different fates. Knightley’s smokey-eyed sylph and McAvoy’s’s wounded poetic prole make bizarre symbol-laden exits and Briony (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) matures into a shriveled, penitent old maid. Redgrave deserves every Best Actress award there is for her last-second, five-minute performance. Not a mere Supporting prize because she picks this high-priced twaddle out of the Anthony Minghella gutter, hoists it on her straight shoulders and gives it unearned feeling. Yet even this high-toned cultural coup is too obvious to miss: It’s the same corrupted-child-becomes-a-repressed-adult role that Sir Michael Redgrave played in Joseph Losey’s 1971 The Go-Between. No doubt that was the real source of McEwan’s literary rip-off and Wright’s Atonement is absolutely inferior.
Directed by Joe Wright
If Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner were responding to cinema almost 100 years ago, what was the inspiration for Ian McEwan’s 1990s novel, Atonement? Director Joe Wright gives the game away in his film version of Atonement, a highly derivative prestige movie that makes a fetish of McEwan’s literary self-consciousness by translating it into the most fussy, pretentiously directed movie since Andrew Dominik’s Jesse James/Robert Ford.
This is worse because, at the movies, literary pretense is excessive. Every jump-cut, flashback, pirouetting camera gimmick is designed to represent some grandiloquent wordy pomposity. Designed to impress, not to be felt, Atonement exemplifies the British snobbery it pretends to critique. The story of Briony (Saoirse Ronan)—a rich teenage girl in 1935 England, whose careless lie ruins several people’s lives—is meant to show childhood innocence being corrupted by both the excesses of class and the mysteries of adult sexuality. But Innocence and Corruption are not the real subjects; Wright concentrates on the appreciation of innocence and corruption just as McEwan’s writing congratulates readers on their own good-taste appreciation of his sophistry.
Briony’s story never fulfills McEwan’s tragic outline because of Wright’s superficial emphasis on the classy concept. He directs with the overwrought enthusiasm of a true second-rater: giving a flamboyant mystique to the estate where Briony observes her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) flirting with the maid’s virile son Robbie (James McAvoy). Adding more portentousness, Wright nods to McEwan’s envy of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner by fracturing time and replaying enigmatic actions (a young woman slipping off clothes to dip into a fountain, a young man lighting a cigarette). He cues everything to an annoying soundtrack that mixes Dario Marianelli’s muzak with incessant clacking of typewriter keys. There’s gigantic close-ups of the typewriter characters as Robbie composes a risque love letter to Cecilia. In Wright’s shameless rip of Citizen Kane, the screen-filling “C-U-N-T” really is W-E-A-K.
Too soon after sketching Briony’s naiveté, Wright dispenses with her psychological portrait and jumps 10 years ahead into WWII. Robbie is displaced by the war, Cecilia suffers on the homefront and Briony (now played by Romola Garai) staggers through nursing duty in London. Briony’s character is no longer explored. Wright’s fancy, classy time-tricks neglect a more logical or honest presentation of the events that followed Briony’s betrayal. The entire story becomes a hysterical overreaction to adolescent confusion, leading to Wright’s show-offy digression on the meaningless cruelty of war. He films the British army evacuation at Dunkirk in one long, fluid take. One of those operatic apocalypses that Alfonso Cuarón staged in Children of Men—any pretentious director can do it, even with an ironic/iconic Ferris wheel in the background.
Done-in by his own self-importance, Wright overwhelms the story’s personal tragedy with extravagant depictions of his love triangle’s different fates. Knightley’s smokey-eyed sylph and McAvoy’s’s wounded poetic prole make bizarre symbol-laden exits and Briony (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) matures into a shriveled, penitent old maid. Redgrave deserves every Best Actress award there is for her last-second, five-minute performance. Not a mere Supporting prize because she picks this high-priced twaddle out of the Anthony Minghella gutter, hoists it on her straight shoulders and gives it unearned feeling. Yet even this high-toned cultural coup is too obvious to miss: It’s the same corrupted-child-becomes-a-repressed-adult role that Sir Michael Redgrave played in Joseph Losey’s 1971 The Go-Between. No doubt that was the real source of McEwan’s literary rip-off and Wright’s Atonement is absolutely inferior.
