Atonement – 2007
This was a good movie. It was a tragic romance, but you don’t know it until the last few minutes of the film. I mean, it was a romance, but you don’t get the tragedy until the end. It starred James McAvoy and Keira Knightly as the star-crossed lovers, Robbie Turner, and Cecilia Tallis. She was a high-born girl in England in 1935. He was the well-educated son of her family’s housekeeper. But in reality neither of them is the film’s main protagonist.
That role is filled by Cecilia’s 13 year-old sister, Briony, wonderfully played by Saoirse Ronan. She is a precocious young girl with dreams of becoming a famous author. She is secretly in love with Robbie. But everything goes awry when Robbie writes Cecilia an erotic letter which Briony reads. She also catches Robbie and Cecilia making love, and believes him to be a sex maniac. The situation goes from bad to worse when Briony also catches a man raping her fifteen year-old cousin Lola, played by Juno Temple. In an act of childish petulance, she tells the police that Robbie is the rapist, even though she knows it was a friend of the family, Paul Marshall, played by Benedict Cumberbatch.
The innocent Robbie is taken to jail where he is incarcerated for four years. He is only released on the condition that he joins the army to fight in WWII. Cecilia, having never believed in his guilt, is only able to see him for a few minutes before he must leave for France. Before he goes, the two declare their love for each other and promise to marry after the war is over. Robbie is physically and emotionally traumatized by the war. But he survives and makes it to the beaches of Dunkirk where he waits to be evacuated.
Meanwhile, Briony, now 18 and played by Romola Garai, has been wracked with guilt over her lie which ruined not only Robbie’s life but her sister’s chance at love and happiness. She becomes a nurse in London in an attempt to contribute to society in a positive way. Her efforts to get in touch with Cecilia are all refused. Eventually, she seeks out her sister and finds her in a tiny apartment where, to Briony’s surprise, she finds Robbie as well. Robbie yells at her and makes her promise to tell both the Tallis family and the police the truth, and then leave him and Cecilia alone forever. Briony tearfully agrees to do as he demands.
Then we cut to Briony as an old lady, played by Vanessa Redgrave. She has achieved her goal of being a famous novelist and is giving an interview for her latest book which is called Atonement. It is an autobiography which tells the story of her sister and her lover, and of her own involvement in their tragedy. Tragedy? Well, in the interview, Briony reveals that their happy ending was the books only falsehood. In reality, Robbie died at Dunkirk of septicemia, and Cecilia was drowned in the Balham tube station bombing during The Blitz. They were only ever reunited in the fictional ending to Briony’s novel.
The movie’s ending was so well crafted that I was completely taken in by the twist. But it was easy to be fooled. Throughout the entire narrative of the film, especially in the first half of the movie which took place when Briony was thirteen, events were shown out of sequence and from different perspectives.
The performances were all good, but I have to give special props to the three women who played Briony. Ronan and Garai were both stand-outs, and you can rarely go wrong with Vanessa Redgrave. The fictional scene in which she apologizes to the lovers was touching and Garai did a great job. The three women all worked with the same vocal coach to be convincing as the same girl.
Now, I have to mention a specific sequence that was very impressive to watch. It was Robbie’s arrival at Dunkirk. It was a single shot that lasted over five minutes. It was an incredibly emotional scene where Robbie and his two mates, Tommy and Frank, played by Daniel Mays and Nonso Anozie, wander around the beach in a surrealistic nightmare. It seemed like there were hundreds of extras scattered over the beach, many with terrible wounds, many in stupors of shock and dismay. This is where the beautiful score by Dario Marianelli was really given a chance to shine.
And speaking of the music, it is important to note that Marianelli took home the film’s only Oscar for his efforts. Throughout the movie I was impressed with something he did that I have never seen done before. He used sounds from the story and blended them into his score in an amazing way. For example when Robbie was being taken away to jail, his mother began pounding on the hood of the police car. The sound of that pounding was incorporated into the music. Really, it was a stroke of genius and a wonderful little way to help tell the story.