Attaining Atonement

Can the film version of Atonement make up for the novel’s sins?

By D.K. Holm

When autumn comes around, the playground known as Hollywood puts aside its childish things, its tanks and rayguns and comic book figurines and porcelain dolls, and turns to adult matters: family crises, revenge, political infamy. Though unpleasant, at least these concepts are dramatizable. But screenwriters (mostly trained to tell tales of adolescent lust) find it difficult to address mature themes, so Hollywood, in its Oscar-whoring phase of the year, turns to other shores (specifically, England), to whom traditionally the local movie industry has traditionally felt inferior. (Well, they do the accents better, anyway.)
 
Thus, with fall come the serious adult films that are supposed to make you think, as opposed to those spring and summer movies that are supposed to make you laugh, cheer, gloat, or perhaps masturbate (if your taste in sex symbols veers toward the plasticene). In fall and winter the brats are safely ensconced in school, and the adults are encouraged to venture out of their bomb shelters and cocoons and take in a prestige picture or two. If they don’t know what to pick, they can wait until Sunday, February 24th, 2008, when the Academy of Motion Pictures “Arts” and Sciences (quotations mine) will give sanction to a small catalog of pretentious art fare, most of which will probably come from England. Then said adults can rent them on DVD.
 
The first big film in the English-biased Oscar stakes is Atonement. It comes with pedigree and pre-digested acclaim. Atonement is based on a novel by the repeat Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan and the film was the toast of the Venice Film Festival, where its nomination for a Golden Lion belies the excitement it created (if film magazine festival reports are to be believed). It also represents the kind of classy, prestige production that Hollywood ostensibly loves (at least when awards season starts), a British Heritage tale of sexual repression set amongst the upper classes with a few token proles thrown in for color.
 
McEwan’s book is a post-modernist exercise heavily influenced by, or perhaps commenting upon, such predecessors as Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey), Henry James (What Masie Knew and The Golden Bowl), the more modern Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, L.P. Hartley’s masterpiece The Go-Between, a book by Rosamund Lehmann called Dusty Answer, and most controversially, an autobiography by Lucilla Andrews called No Time for Romance (which McEwan was accused in print of plagiarizing). Andrews was a romance novelist whose real life experiences in WWII are mirrored in large portions of McEwan’s novel.
 
Given the book’s flights through time and its unreliable narrator, it doesn’t strike one immediately as the easiest thing to adapt to the commercial screen, where a premium is placed on clarity, order, and honesty (but more about that in a few minutes). The book can be broken down into four parts. The first concerns a summer day in 1935 in which a young upper class girl and aspiring writer named Briony Tallis (played by Saoirse Ronan in the movie) identifies Robbie Turner (James McAvoy, of The Last King of Scotland fame), the son of the estate’s housekeeper who enjoyed a special dispensation to attend Oxford, as the man whom she saw rape her cousin Lola. This accusation breaks up a budding romance between Robbie and Briony’s older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley).
 
Part two of the book picks up with Robbie (who served a three-year sentence for the rape he didn’t commit) at Dunkirk, where as a member of the retreating British Expeditionary Forces he is wandering the Fellini-esque coast and remembering the past. Part three focuses on Briony (now played by Romola Garai), who is a volunteer nurse and guilt-wracked by her mistaken identification (it turns out to have been a callous friend of her brother, who actually ends up marrying Lola). She attempts to bring Robbie and Cecilia (who has repudiated her family since that day in 1935 and is now also a nurse) together.
 
Finally, the fourth part has Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) at yet another stage (the present), where the septuagenarian authoress reveals that, contrary to what she writes in her novel, Atonement, Cecilia and Robbie never met again, he dying on the shore of Dunkirk, she paradoxically drowned in a subway station during an air raid (water is a looming image in the book). Therefore the novel is something of a self-deluding lie designed to expose that futility of literature to help, heal, or enlighten.
 
The movie tells the same story, trading time jumps for the technique of replaying certain scenes from the perspective of different participant characters. Joe Wright, who was wildly praised for his version of Pride and Prejudice, directs Atonement, and the script is credited to playwright Christopher Hampton. So members of England’s filmmaking elite have joined forces to manufacture a tiny example of their Heritage art.
 
Yet despite the narrative jumping around and the mud-caked grandeur of the wartime sequences (including an attention grabbing long Steadicam shot through the masses of waiting soldiers), Atonement is slow moving, overly-oblique, and direly determined by its own odd thesis. For example, the engine of the plot is fired up when from a distance Briony sees Cecelia, right in front of Robbie, take off her outer clothes and leap into the fountain in the center of the estate to do something mysterious. Later in a replay we learn the foundation for Cecilia’s action, but even then it’s still ambiguous. Briony is supposed to misinterpret Cecilia’s fountain dive. But does she? And is there something unstated about her feelings for Robbie? Or not? Without clarity in the early, convoluted set-up, the later remorse makes little sense.
 
But more important, Atonement aspires to be a work of art, but one that questions art’s ability to have an effect on its human readers and auditors. In this sense it is “veddy veddy post-modern,” post-structuralist, and, of course, post-sense. McEwan and Wright pull a cruel Nabokovian trick on the audience at the end of the film, telling them that what meager bit of happiness they have just seen is a lie, one that the adult Briony has told herself. We are presumably supposed to be impressed (as we are at the end of Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and its three successive endings), but in reality we are made even more sad and put out, the way we are when Nabokov, in the interest of some vaguely defined higher art, refutes the traditional passage he has written and replaces it with a colder, callous account of events. Nabokov’s switcheroo is meant to expose (and cure?) the Philistine codes of his lesser readers. McEwan’s point seems to be the dubious assertion that art is a fraud that neither helps nor changes anything. If that’s the case, then Atonement doesn’t deserve attendance.