It is an easy confession for me that I did not want to watch “Atonement” after seeing the trailers. I had not read the book and did not know more than the trailers showed me: a couple (Keira Knightley and James McAvoy) were separated by a false accusation and World War II. I had it chalked up as another costumed romance from the director of “Pride and Prejudice.” For those of you who have seen the trailer and have no desire to see the movie, please take my advice and go see it. The film is more than a love-separated-by-war story, although the romantic elements of the tale are quite devastatingly powerful. Director Joe Wright manages to take a meta-book about the nature of fiction and apply it perfectly to the screen in ways that still baffle me.
It is hard to give the movie a full discussion without divulging some of the plot twists that occur and especially the revelatory ending. If you have not seen the movie, I request that you stop reading and go see it. You will not be disappointed. If you have seen the movie, please feel free to continue reading.
Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement” ends, as the movie does, with an epilogue in which an elder Briony Tallis (Vanessa Redgrave) gives us insight into the events preceding. Up until this point we have followed the unfortunate relationship between Robbie (McAvoy), one of the groundskeepers for the Tallis estate, and Cecilia Tallis (Knightley). Wrongly accused for rape, Robbie is sent to prison on the night he confesses his love for Cecilia. The accusation is made by Briony, who is meticulously played by Saoirse Ronan. The film starts on the Tallis estate as Cecilia and Robbie court each other and then leaps ahead, as we the viewers, watch and hope against all odds that the two will survive the war and the distance and be rightfully reunited.
The twist of sorts that is enacted at the end of the story is that the previous two hours were actually a book, also titled “Atonement,” that Briony has written in attempt to purge her guilt. We learn that not all of the events that have been presented are how they actually transpired.
It is here that the movie leaps from being a simple love story and into a new level of consciousness. McEwan’s novel purposefully plays with the notions of fiction and the written word by taking what we have believed to be true, and then forcing us to realize what we have read is fabricated. An action that is compounded even more by the fact that this novel-within-a-novel has the same title. How this self-reflexivity is achieved in the film adaptation is nothing short of genius.
Take for instance the evacuation of Dunkirk scene. On one level, this uncut carnival is a triumph in its own right. The unbroken camera work that winds through a beach littered with soldiers, burning buildings, dead horses, and flaming amusement park rides rivals some of the greatest scenes in filmmaking. The deliberate movement and almost dream-like motion of the camera though, belies an element of choreography that works as a counterpoint to the image however. The soldiers are bloody, scarred, and mud splattered, yet the camera captures them in tableaus that are too stylized to exist in reality.
It is only upon reaching the end of the film and thinking backwards that we realize what we have seen. In attempting to fill in all the gaps in her novel, Briony has spent years researching the evacuation and aspects of Robbie’s life that she could never know. What we are seeing is not an eye-witness account of the evacuation, but a carefully reconstructed illusion of what it might have been. This double layering of Briony’s construction of the story and Wright’s consummation of it in image, should immediately make the viewer realize the ramifications within the diegesis and the fact that as a film it is, in itself, a construct of fiction.
If the historical images of returning soldiers are then factored into all of this, we are forced to treat the heightened reality of the beach scene even more circumspectly. This clever use of various filmic techniques allows the movie to reach a level of insight which McEwan was not able to achieve with text alone. Wright’s clever playing with cinematic standards and forms allows us to realize that we are both watching a fictional event and that we are forced to question the purpose of such a fictional re-creation.
As Briony ponders at the end of the film,
So, my sister and Robbie were never able to have the time together they both so longed for… and deserved. Which ever since I’ve… ever since I’ve always felt I prevented. But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or… evasion… but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.
the film forces the viewer to question the same conceit. We are presented with the option to view the ending as we wish, a chose your own adventure of sorts. Stepping back further from the film, we realize, obviously, that James McAvoy and Keira Knightley are still alive and their fates are not the ones we have fretted and cried about. Instead, it is their fictional counterparts, which forever exist or cease to exist on paper/celluloid. We are forced, through the nature of the construction of the story and how Joe Wright has managed to circumvent the standard narrative of modern film, to question if redemption and fulfillment can be granted through fictional means and if not, then what, after all, is the point?