On a tragic summer, out of a little girl’s vivid imagination, she accused a man with a crime he didn’t commit and would soon spend the rest of her life regretting what she had done, changing the lives around her that would never be the same again. This is ATONEMENT, a tale about a woman’s redemption and penance to the falsehood she used to extirpate lives, told in a fashion which shimmers with intrinsic cinematic power that’s uniquely British and nearly as flawless as possible. It swings with moods, atmosphere and emotionally-charged sequences that vibrantly flutter from classic cinema-making to modern storytelling.


Adapted from Ian McEwan’s madly bestselling novel of the same name back in 2004, which pushed him to fame and bestsellerdom, Joe Wright’s cinematic interpretation is spectacular – one that rarely happens when filmmakers transform literary pages to filmic histrionics. Well, knowing that he’s done the book-to-film drill already with last year’s brilliant PRIDE & PREJUDICE (that did make the Jane Austen fandom teary-eyed proud), there’s so much confidence in Wright’s adept skill when he started this project. Now, the result – the screenplay works, the cinematography is a glowing masterpiece, the score is surrealistically haunting, and the editing requires great immersion as the scenes shifts backwards and forwards, all building up to a tension and a conflict that pulls you like a galvanic magnet.


This tightly moralistic tale starts off in a Victorian manor in an English countryside circa 1935 with the well-off family of Tallises. 13-year old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a fledgling writer, sits with her typewriter as she was finishing her play “The Trials of Arabella” for her brother Leon’s homecoming dinner. Briony, severely know-it-all with a cold blue-eyed gimlet stare, witnesses her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) coming out of the pond half-naked in front of the housekeeper’s son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), and depicted something straight away in her fertile imagination. This elusive judgment of hers came to be proven even more when Robbie handed her a letter meant for Cecilia – that turned out to be a pornographic letter he handed out by mistake – which supposed to be a sorry note. A sordid letter confirmed Briony’s suspicion, as her pettiness made her so dangerous and perniciously cruel, that it all led to a quagmire nobody expected to happen in that night. She caught Robbie pinning her sister Cecilia against the shelves in the library doing an extremely salacious act in the eyes of a thirteen year-old. It was made even much worse when their cousin Lola Quincey was found raped in the midst of an all-search for the lost young twins, who both escaped the manor. Briony was there and saw it by herself that Lola was raped by her older brother’s friend, but pointed the blame to Robbie, calling him a “sex maniac”.


Of course, Briony didn’t know the whole story, and Cecilia was reduced to vulnerability against her younger sister’s playing-innocent fibs. Cecilia, with all her life, trusts Robbie because he’s a childhood friend and went to university with her in her father’s expense, and they were both in love but altogether thought they were too juvenile for the relationship. In the brilliantly handled scenes expertly orchestrated by Wright, from the glowing palettes and shades of Seamus McGarvey’s gorgeous cinematography to dramatics of the key characters, from Knightley and McAvoy’s near-faultless performances to the young girl Ronan’s haunting and calculating stares – it all balanced the air of golden and youthful decadence. Then it all seemed to melt in the heat that it emanates, as Robbie was arrested and put to prison, and suddenly jumps into the bleak and hopeless France, 4 years later, as he joined the army.


While the WWII rages around them, Briony grows up now, 18 years old, realising her greatest mistake and started serving her own personal penance and retribution as she turned down her offer from Cambridge and worked in a hospital instead as a nurse to help more wounded soldiers from the war, as she also seeks forgiveness from her sister. Cecilia, on the other hand, also works in the same hospital but never talks to her sister anymore.


ATONEMENT, with its gratifying visual eminence, is also blessed with elite performances. The vindictive young Briony was played by Saoirse Ronan, a breakthrough act for this young actress that needs recognition. Her transition to the 18-year old Briony working as a nurse in the shattered London was played with such a sympathetic sweep by Romola Garai that you somehow feel sorry as well for her no matter what she had done in the past, then transforms in her late age as a troubled novelist played by Vanessa Redgrave. But it is Ronan’s stunning performance as a child bereft of mature guidance, lost in her imagination’s wilderness that easily eclipses the other two older actresses. Knightley could finally prove that she’s one of the best actresses working in her generation today with such poise she wouldn’t stumble. This is a perfect career move, giving Cecilia that undulating spirit for love as she longingly says “Come back to me...” to Robbie, a woman whose destiny was bound to a single error committed by her sister and was forced to live a life with dissatisfaction. McAvoy, now being tagged as the new leading man of town, is on his full form as Robbie, especially the scenes in Dunkirk, a surprisingly long, almost 10-minute complex shot that shows the desperation of the people in the beach as they wait for rescue, harbouring so much emotional complexity that it’s almost heartbreaking to watch.


And the ending, don’t continue reading this if you don’t want to know. A sad and tragic fate for Cecilia and Robbie, with Briony paying a tribute to them with her final book called “Atonement”, telling all the truth in it that she distorted during that eventful summer, except for a happy ending that she believed both Cecilia and Robbie deserved so much in their lives. After you’ve watched it, it would stay with you for a while and will keep on reminding you this moral tale of a girl who deprived the happiness of two people because of childish fancy and immature conviction.


Right, you should see it before I carry on schmoozing here. It is a majestic film, rest assured. ATONEMENT is intelligent, brave and bold. The first act during the summer scenes is a force that regenerates bravura in filmmaking as the story unfolds, the second act with the WWII London days and France expedition will grab your senses in an extraordinary way (especially the tracking shot in Dunkirk scenes), and the third act with Briony finishes her story and finally atoning will clench your heart with an unexpected sincerity.


VERDICT:

A haunting, respectable story blended with beautiful, eye-watering cinematography added with sincere direction, ATONEMENT is a near-perfect film for the eyes, the mind, the heart and soul. Doubtlessly, this is Wright’s masterstroke with masterclass performances. Bet your bollocks for an Oscar Best Picture nom next year.



RATING: A