The Clairvoyance of Passion

Joe Wright’s Atonement is a lush and impressionistic portrait of Ian McEwan’s celebrated novel. The story takes place over a fifty year period, beginning at the Edenesque Tallis Estate, moving to the apocalyptic images of war, culminating, as a kind of metaphysical anterior, in a television studio. At every moment, Wright exercises an absolute control over the film’s expansive landscapes. His execution is unflinching as he paints with large strokes, presenting sweeping panoramas. The frames often threaten to overpower the screen, exhibiting a rare quality in filmmaking, when technical antithesis is able to express and sculpt the psychological interior of a character. In doing so, the film stays true to the Ian McEwan novel with its cinematic translation of psychological realism.

The first half of the film is inscribed with an uneasy tension between the comical encounters between Cecelia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) and the blossoming, yet confused, passions of a young Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan). Ronan is convincing as the detached, imaginative spectator – voyeur onto the genesis of Robbie and Cecelia’s love. She magnificently negotiates the awkward, blurry division between sexually precocious and ascetic prepubescent with her asexual demeanor. McAvoy and Knightley, however, perform as if they are their own spectators, too self-conscious to capture the required contrast between Briony’s fictional displacement and the truth of their character’s reality. The tension culminates in Briony’s coitus interruptus of the lover’s lusty exchange in the library, which she misinterprets as violence. This sets the stage for the tragic assault of Briony’s cousin Lola by the wealthy friend of older brother Leon Tallis. Briony fasley accuses Robbie.

Wright is at his best in these early moments of the film, most notably when he leads the viewer through the psychological interior of the young Briony Tallis. The baroque gardens take on an expressionistic feel as they become a place where identity, sexuality, reality and fiction form a nebulous, unintelligible system, capable of distortion. The scene brilliantly climaxes when the young Briony’s flashlight illumines the inherent abjection of human sexuality. This scene prefigures the cultural crisis of World War II: innocence is lost, morality shown for its malevolence and the passions of man ambivalent to life and beauty.

The film falters; Wright forgets that it is Briony’s coming of age that serves as the foil for World War II. The tension is lost when Knightley and McAvoy take center stage with unremarkable performances – the former too nymph-like to capture the matronly undertones of Cecelia Tallis. Even at the film’s end, when the aged Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) delivers a closing monologue on her atonement, the moment at which the narrative folds over and consumes itself for a final time, Wright cannot help but shift our attention to a sentimental scene on the beach to marvel once more at the fragile beauty of our heroes Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner. This repeats a fundamental error that leaves the viewer with two irreconcilable halves: Atonement is not a love story; it is a bildungsroman.