I had absolutely no interest in seeing this ("From the director of PRIDE & PREJUDICE" doesn't get me going), but lost a coin toss and ended up seeing it yesterday. So imagine my surprise/shock/disbelief when I come out thinking it is one of the best films I have seen in my entire life.

Director Joe Wright keeps things moving at a really fast pace (not something I normally associate with this genre) and jumps backwards to allow the audience a chance to witness events twice. There is also an amazing musical motif going on with the incorporation of all of the major "instruments" the characters use. Plus, you get an amazing 5 minute tracking shot and get to see a Jean Gabin (who I recognized immediately by his nose) flick for a few minutes.

What really sealed this for me was the ending of the film. I can't think of anything more subversive than that.



MAJOR SPOILERS



The film shows the two lovers have finally reunited and are living happily ever after. Then, in keeping with the film's style of jumping around in time, we flash forward some 50 years only to learn that this is a fictionalized ending to the real life relationship by one of the survivors who has written a book about the entire affair. In the movie reality, the two leads both died and never got back together. Take that Frank Darabont!



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I know that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is the odds on favorite to win big at the Academy Awards, but I think ATONEMENT will give it a great run for its money (pardon the pun). Anyone else see it yet?

MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.....

I too was highly impressed with this film (especially the typewriter key music and the beachfront tracking shot!), until the ending. Maybe I'm skewing the moral point here (no, I haven't read the novel), but I don't think Briny could ever atone for what she'd done. Writing that fictional ending would not in any way make up for what happened to her 'characters' real-life counterparts. I don't think the film is really suggesting that it does, but the ending plays AS IF they get to live on in literary history and inspire countless people who read the book, etc., and we can some how let this old woman finally die in peace.
I don't agree.
I think the ending would have been 'subversive', as you put it, if you didn't see them walking on the beach. This, for me, completely deflated the emotional punch of Vanessa Redgrave's appearance. I would have preferred the film cut to black after her explanation. She's voiced her feelings, let the audience decide what to make of it....
I also think that this 'walking on the beach' undercuts the larger analogy of humanity's need to atone for War. If we can forgive Briny, does that mean we should forgive Hitler (or God?) for what we saw on what I'd like to think is that very same beachfront from earlier in the film?

In general, I like McEwan's work - especially THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS but not so much ENDURING LOVE - but I haven't read the book yet and I want to read it before seeing the film version.

This really, really didn't strike me as the kind of picture I'd be interested in - great, another British period piece featuring lots of posh people - but for some reason I ended up seeing it anyway.

I too thought it was one of the best of the year. I thought the ending was terrific, though I don't know how it would have impacted on me if I'd read the book (I haven't). Well acted, and quite frankly I'd be happy to see Joe Wright scoop an Oscar on the strength of that tracking shot alone. He's certainly the Coen's closest contender though I don't see him winning.

. . . I enjoyed the novel as well as the film - the script and direction work together to bring a very difficult, very literary work to the screen . . .

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. . . another thing about the story I admire (in addition to those already mentioned), is that this is also about two people whose life/future is cut short by war - most films would have had the hero escape from the subway as water rushes in and drowns the extras, or escape from the beach at Dunkirk as the wounded extras die; it is a bit like the ending of GALLIPOLI (1981) where you finally realize the entire film has built to the sudden death of one soldier among hundreds/thousands as he charges from a trench . . . both films give these deaths that usually take place in the background a great deal of substance . . .

A good film from a difficult-to-adapt book, one I need to see again. The House Next Door blog had some interesting contrarian thoughts about it some time ago, not that reviews were necessarily NO COUNTRY-level raves. I'm not sure I would have gotten it had I not read the book first (it had been on my shelf for five years, and getting to it also got me to read longtime shelf sitters THE CORRECTIONS, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, and UNDERWORLD) but obviously it makes an impact on those who haven't, either (I wonder if the dismissive DVD Savant would have iked it more had he read it first?).

My criticism of the book, which I read four years ago, applies equally to the movie.

MAJOR SPOILER

1. The story's plot twist requires us to accept a contradiction. Why did Briony rescind her accusation of Robbie Turner? We learn (by way of Cecilia’s letter in Part II) that after the passage of several years Briony no longer holds Robbie responsible for the assault on Lola. But what changed her mind? We had been given every indication in Part I that Briony truly believed she saw Robbie run from the crime scene and that Robbie was guilty. Briony may have been mistaken in her observation, but the author never suggests that she knowingly lied. How could she then, in the interim of several years, suddenly conclude that the person she had seen was not Robbie at all, but Paul Marshall? Why should the recollection of an event some five years ago be considered more accurate than the recollection of an event of the same evening?

If the person Briony saw with Lola was actually Paul Marshall, Briony would have known this at the very moment she gave testimony to the police. She would not have acquired this knowledge over time with a growing understanding of human sexuality as the book (and movie) would have us believe.

Either Briony knowingly and willfully deceived the police or the person she saw fleeing from the ravished Lola was in fact Robbie Turner all along.

2. Even if Robbie is not guilty (a premise we derive from our less than reliable narrator), why should we hold the child responsible for the deaths of her sister and her sister’s lover? A great many of Robbie’s generation died in battle, if not at Dunkirk then in North Africa, Italy, France and the Pacific Theatre. And a German bomb might have found its way to Cecilia even if she had not had a falling out with her family.

Has he seen it? Seemed like he was just responding to the hype surrounding the big long-take shot.

MAJOR SPOILERS EVERYWHERE

My answer is based solely on the movie, but I deduced that Briony intentionally lied because she was jealous of the relationship her sister had with Robbie. After all, Briony said Robbie was her crush and her accusation comes following the scene in the study where Briony found the two of them together.

I think she can be held responsible as she put Robbie directly in the front line. Up until the arrest, he was going to go to medical school, which probably would have made him a doctor in training during WWII and kept him in London. You can also say that Briony put Cecelia in that tunnel during the bombing. Cecelia turned her back on her family after Robbie's arrest and ended up as a nurse living in that tiny apartment. Had she stayed with her family, chances are she would have never been there.

In an earlier posting, Savant, usually more upbeat, had at it, with surprising venom.

Regarding what David Rosinger asked, William's answers stand. The book and movie would have to have been called INNOCENT MISTAKE, or WHOOPS! :) , if Briony hadn't lied.

Here's The House Next Door piece I had mentioned.

MAJOR SPOILERS

That would neatly settle matters if there weren't conflicting facts. In both the book and the movie Briony says that her accusation was a mistake based on a child's misunderstanding of sexual matters. In essence this is what she tells her fellow nursing student in London when she shows her the manuscript, "Two Figures at a Fountain."

I think the critic Steve Sailer is on to something when he writes that McEwan “ineptly plotted himself into a corner” and skipped from the “rape” directly to World War II to distract us from considering how well Briony would have been able to maintain her lie (or “misunderstanding”) under rigorous cross-examination in the courtroom.

Where he might have drowned in an Underground station after a bomb hit a water main! Briony assumes far too much. Yes, her words put Robbie in prison; she did not make him volunteer for battle duty. Nor can we assume that every doctor of draft age in World War II was out of harm’s way. As for Cecilia, many women of the period volunteered for hazardous service as a way of lending support to their loved ones in uniform. Why should we expect that Cecilia would not have done the same?

Briony’s guilt brings up still another point: if she really wished to atone for her false accusation, would it not have been better to go to the press and publicly retract her testimony than to carry bedpans in a military hospital? If she had something to regret, why wait until the age of 77 to write a novel to clear Robbie’s name? Why not tell it to the Times, the Mirror and the Evening Standard in 1940?

Except that "atonement" includes the concept of setting right an injustice that one may have caused unintentionally:

"Amends or reparation made for an injury or wrong; expiation." (American Heritage Dictionary)

All I can say is that however one perceives its storyline I wish the film version of McEwan's THE INNOCENT, which should have been a slam dunk, were half as good as this adaptation. A must-read for Mobians.

SOME SPOILERS

I found the first 45 minutes quite gripping, and the ending is a surprising but smart twist (even though I could have done without the corny shot of Robbie and Cecilia on the beach). However, I found the middle of the film to be extremely boring. As soon as the war starts, we lose the main thread of the story as the characters' lives are overwhelmed by the war. This is undoubtedly true to life since war obviously sweeps away most of the concerns of ordinary living. Still, this is a movie, and I wanted to see what was going to happen between Robbie, Cecilia, and Briony. Instead, I get many scenes of Robbie wandering through the countryside, followed by him wandering around Dunkirk, plus numerous scenes of Cecilia and Briony becoming nurses. The filmmakers completely failed to keep the main story going through this long, long middle section. It is too bad because so many elements of the film are very well done.

Hmm, I didn't really care for this, and some of the specifics cited as virtues were aspects that I found myself rejecting as borderline ham-fisted (the typing-as-percussion, for one).

Since my feelings about it weren't particularly strong (certainly I wasn't engaged enough to take on Briony's 'misapprehension' as ultimately much more than plotty contrivance), I'll bow out of tearing into it. It seems to have impressed more than a few.

I just wanted to mention that, for me at least, this was pretty much a non-starter.

The Golden Globes may or may not mean anything, but ATONEMENT nabbed the top prize anyway.

I fully expect it to not only be nominated for, but to win, the Best Picture Oscar™.