2008 Woodie Awards
'Atonement' captures shadows of war with soothing cinematography and performances
John Yehambaram
Issue date: 2/18/08 Section: Intermission
Movie Review
It is no surprise "Atonement" is one of the movies nominated for best picture at this year's Oscars.
Director Joe Wright springs Ian McEwan's celebrated 2001 novel to life enthrallingly and vividly. Its largely set in 1930s and '40s England, about an adolescent outburst of spite that destroys two lives.
The structure of the McEwan novel and this film, directed by Joe Wright, is relentless. How many films have we seen that fascinate in every moment and then, in the last moments, pose a question about all that has gone before, one that forces us to think deeply about what betrayal and atonement might really entail?
Like the novel, the movie plunges straight into the events of a hot summer's day in rural southeast England, 1935. The opening almost goes straight to the point as the first of the day's cumulative misunderstandings takes place.
Briony (Saoirse Ronan) watches from a bedroom window as her elegant but bored sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), spontaneously strips down to her underwear and climbs into a pond to retrieve something for Robbie Turner (James McAvoy). Turner is the housekeeper's son, who's been raised almost as part of the family, but is forever several social notches below them.
The tipping point in "Atonement" is only slightly less melodramatic, an unnerving act of false witness-bearing that alters the fate of a snobby rural British family on a hot summer day in 1935 and thrusts its younger generation into a world war, one of whose casualties will be the centuries of class privilege.
When a purported child rape takes place elsewhere on the grounds of the Tallis' hideously ornate mansion, Briony tells a lie that, together with the coming war, will ruin more lives than her own.
Knightley is shrewdly cast as a brittle girl with womanly potential, and McAvoy nicely underplays the innocent carnality who will drop Turner into the hottest water of his inexperienced young life and props up this beautiful, but lightly gifted actress with all the chemistry she needs.
It is no surprise "Atonement" is one of the movies nominated for best picture at this year's Oscars.
Director Joe Wright springs Ian McEwan's celebrated 2001 novel to life enthrallingly and vividly. Its largely set in 1930s and '40s England, about an adolescent outburst of spite that destroys two lives.
The structure of the McEwan novel and this film, directed by Joe Wright, is relentless. How many films have we seen that fascinate in every moment and then, in the last moments, pose a question about all that has gone before, one that forces us to think deeply about what betrayal and atonement might really entail?
Like the novel, the movie plunges straight into the events of a hot summer's day in rural southeast England, 1935. The opening almost goes straight to the point as the first of the day's cumulative misunderstandings takes place.
Briony (Saoirse Ronan) watches from a bedroom window as her elegant but bored sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), spontaneously strips down to her underwear and climbs into a pond to retrieve something for Robbie Turner (James McAvoy). Turner is the housekeeper's son, who's been raised almost as part of the family, but is forever several social notches below them.
The tipping point in "Atonement" is only slightly less melodramatic, an unnerving act of false witness-bearing that alters the fate of a snobby rural British family on a hot summer day in 1935 and thrusts its younger generation into a world war, one of whose casualties will be the centuries of class privilege.
When a purported child rape takes place elsewhere on the grounds of the Tallis' hideously ornate mansion, Briony tells a lie that, together with the coming war, will ruin more lives than her own.
Knightley is shrewdly cast as a brittle girl with womanly potential, and McAvoy nicely underplays the innocent carnality who will drop Turner into the hottest water of his inexperienced young life and props up this beautiful, but lightly gifted actress with all the chemistry she needs.