BlissAndConversation.com

REVIEWING YOUR LIFE ON STAGE AND SCREEN:

INTRODUCTION

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.  We hope you’ll add your comments to reviewing your life on stage and screen

Keira Knightley and James McAvoy

   Some viewers call this movie a romance, others call it a downer.  What novelist Ian McEwen is after here and what director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton faithfully portray is guilt.   An imaginative child’s resentment and fantasizing highlight the prejudices of the British class system to condemn an innocent boy to prison. 

Like the novel, the film has three parts.  In the first, set in the opulent country home of the Tallis family, 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), already a writer of plays and stories, sees the growing attraction and ultimate love-making of her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and the housekeeper’s son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy).  When she comes across a young cousin Lola (Juno Temple) wrapped in a man’s arms in a dark wood, she accuses Robbie of rape and he is sent to prison.

Part Two follows Robbie across the grim battlefields of France during World War II just before the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk.  In the novel, it’s one of the most powerful depictions of that war you’re likely to encounter.  Wright depicts the war surreally, perhaps through the eyes of the feverish Robbie.  Girls in school uniformas, each neatly shot through the temple, lie in an orchard like sarcophaguses with marble faces.  On the beach at Dunkirk, the camera pans in one long brilliant shot across squadrons running naked into the surf or singing like a choir on a platform.  The choreography includes horses being shot, a ferris wheel slowly spinning against the sky, a soldier apparently sunbathing.  It has the fictional quality of Briony’s stories.  Part Two cuts between the war in France, Cecilia’s life as a nurse in London and the life of Briony, now 18 and played by Romola Garai, as a student nurse there unforgiven by her sister.

Part III portrays Briony in old age, played by Vanessa Redgrave, telling the story of the lovers, first as she wrote about them giving them the life she wanted them to have and confessing her guilt and remorse.  As the film ends, she tells the final truth about Cecilia and Robbie.

“Atonement” is the story of how an artist uses and mis-uses the truth and how some guilts last a lifetime. 

Making this movie work for you.  We each dream of atoning in our own way for our mistakes.  What remains with us after the movie ends is the importance of doing that, the search for how and the resolution to take what happens to us and build on it.