Atonement (2007)Atonement (2007) is a strangely remote and unaffecting movie in spite of all the excellent acting.
But, you may object, the film was hugely popular, with something like an 83% Fresh Tomato rating. Averages can be misleading. For example, if half the population is morbidly obese at 300 pounds and the other half of the population is starving to death at 100 pounds, it is not accurate to say that the citizens are hefty, healthy 200 pounders. Similarly, almost all reviews, no matter how favourable, have qualms about Atonement. The reviews have difficulty identifying why the film doesn’t quite work, so they resort to summaries such as “so boring,” or “so fussy . . . for women, and for a certain kind of woman,” or a good film “in spite of all the quibbles.”
Atonement is remote because it is not primarily about the passionate romance between Cecelia and Robbie but about Briony, the girl and woman who has to atone for perjury and destroying their lives. But we don’t like Briony. As a child she is a bit nasty, manipulative, jealous . . . she has a cold, pale stare. As an 18-year-old nurse who wants to atone for her wrongs, Briony is realistically remote—as one of her nursing colleagues says, “mysterious.” She does seek out her Cecelia to apologize in a realistically constrained fashion, but she does not win our hearts for too little too late. So, when we see Briony as an old woman promoting her last novel, Atonement, we do not particularly care for her. So, when she reveals that, surprise, she did not actually apologize to Cecelia and Robbie for they were both killed in the War, we do not feel horrified empathy at the life-long burden of guilt this poor woman carried. Any concern we have for her suffering is remote and intellectual. With this serious shortcoming, it does not matter how stunning Keira Knightly (Cecelia) looks in her green gown, it does not matter how cleverly the sound track blends music and sound effects, and it does not matter that the unbroken tracking shot on the Dunkirk beach is 4 minutes long. Without pity for Briony’s burden and without regret at the inadequacy of her attempted atonement through literature, the movie remains remote.