Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Atonement / UK / France / 2007

Joe Wright’s manifesto for spoiled, unsympathetic people. With the exception of one secondary character—a mother who violently attacks the police car carrying away her son—I never felt anything other than loathing for these characters; they are complacent in their ways, unmoved by cold and callous manner in which they treat those around them, all while boosting themselves up on pedestals of self-pity. Even Robbie Turner, arrested and imprisoned for a crime he never committed, doesn’t elicits the sympathy he should—unimaginable, considering how easy it is and how sympathetic he should be. Complementing this is a very pompous soundtrack: The clacking of a typewriter, which creeps into dripping rain and a flickering subway light to remind us, over and over again, of the damages inflicted on each main character by the simple use of words.

A chance for redemption comes in the final five minutes, when Vanessa Redgrave appears as an older Briony Tallis. Now a famous writer, she has penned her twenty-first—and last—novel, which she has entitled Atonement. This was her chance, she tells the interviewer, to give some closure to a tragedy she began by uniting two souls she forever tore apart. And while the use of the number 21 is clever—a subtle showing of maturity for someone derided in her younger days as having none, especially when you consider the purpose of her book—it belies something much more infuriating: Briony’s Atonement was written as a means of correcting the past; yet she is correcting one lie with another, albeit a well-intentioned one. Briony leaves the screen just as she appeared: A “fanciful” little girl with funny hair, a storyteller.

Rumsey’s Thoughts, Tom’s Thoughts

by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
06 Feb 2008 9:09 AM | Submit Comment