Being a sceptic helps. On the one hand, it steels you against trash whose egregiousness you underestimate and, on the other, it leaves you defenceless against experiences so transcendentally powerful, that you curse your own scepticism. Yet, the feeling of being so profoundly affected by such an experience is so greatly enriched by this initial scepticism that I am almost grateful for it. It’s like what salt does to a sweet-dish, like what the moon does to the sun and its corona in case of a partial solar eclipse. I intend to keep my scepticism alive. I might as well state the reasons for my scepticism about ‘Atonement’:
1. 1. 1. Keira Knightley
2. The director, whose previous, and first, film was an umpteenth adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, something I’d disliked since school, and positively loathed after seeing what it inspired in Gurinder Chaddha.
3. . 3. It was touted as a story of star-crossed lovers separated by war, a sure-fire excuse for maudlin excess.
‘Atonement’ opens in a palatial house in the English countryside. Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), the youngest in the household, in her early teens, has just finished writing her first play on a typewriter. We see her almost running around the house with the thrill of her accomplishment and the apprehension of how it will be received. The scullery maids are indulgent but unenthusiastic in their approval. So is Robbie (James McAvoy), the young son of the elderly housekeeper. The first real words of encouragement come from her mother who declares it to be “stupendous”. It is interesting to note that she doesn’t approach her elder sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley). When she even as much as voices her anxieties about the play, Cecilia, rather dismissively, says, “I’m sure it’s a masterpiece”. The irony in her voice is lost on Briony: she is simply too young to get it. She does, however sense something is not quite right between Cecilia and Robbie. Again, when she voices it, Cecilia brushes it off carelessly. What she cannot brush off is Briony’s persistent curiosity about the two of them. These seemingly regular episodes of life are, actually, very crucial to how the story plays out later. It provides a sense of the various relationships in the household and offers an insight into Briony’s mind and how it works.
The Tallis household has guests from North England in the form of Briony’s cousins: pudgy, red- and tousle-haired twin boys, about ten, and their equally red-haired, older sister, Lola, slightly older than Briony. They have been sent there on account of their parents’ separation after their mother allegedly “ran away with a Mr. Whatshisname” (another one of Cecilia’s tart observations).
We find that Briony has written the play on the occasion of the arrival of Leon, their oldest brother, presumably, after a long period away from home. He brings along a friend named Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch), heir to a family well-known for their chocolates.
One hot, languid summer day, Briony, from her bedroom window, overlooking the sprawling lawns of the estate, sees Robbie and Cecilia by the fountain. She sees Cecilia taking off her clothes and jump into the fountain pool in only her thin underclothes, with Robbie standing by. A few moments later, Cecilia emerges dripping wet, her underclothes almost blending into her pale skin as she stands shivering under the resplendent summer sun in full view of Robbie. This vision has a strongly disquieting effect on Briony’s mind, already full of curiosity about them.
It has an equally powerful effect on Robbie and Cecilia, although the two effects could not be more different. We see the same episode through their eyes. They have a squabble in which they end up pulling at opposite handles of a priceless vase that Cecilia was carrying. Robbie breaks one of the handles and a large splinter falls into the pool. Cecilia retrieves it, and in doing so, inadvertently reveals herself before Robbie in more ways than one. That one moment draws out buried emotions and sentiments from both of them and brings them to light in their own and each other’s eyes, crystallising them into something permanent, something palpable, something inevitable and, thus, uncontrollable. They are helpless in efforts to understand and check the sluice of untamed passion. Shame is not the least emotion here, given that it is the upper class English society of the early 20th century.
Robbie, despite his embarrassment, cannot stop thinking about Cecilia and, in his reverie, types several drafts of letters, giving form to his deepest desires, his most rapturous fantasies. But they scarcely bring him peace. He decides to write a final, formal letter explaining everything, including his own feelings, to Cecilia and hand it to her at the dinner party at the Tallis household to which he has been invited by Leon. While on his way across the fields, Robbie sees Briony playing and asks her to act as his courier and deliver his letter to Cecilia. Briony blandly agrees. As he sees her run away on her errand, Robbie, in a startling moment of epiphany, realises that he has handed the wrong, inappropriate letter to Briony. His paroxysmal scream of “Briony” is futile and echoes emptily over the rolling fields over as Briony races to her destination. She does deliver it to Cecilia, but not before her own unhealthy curiosity gets the better of her. The results are devastating. Briony is shocked beyond belief at what she thinks is sheer depravity on Robbie’s part. It affects her so deeply that she is filled with fear and hatred against him. So much so, that, in the tragic chain events that occur later that night, it is Briony who serves as a witness, and deposes before the police that Robbie is the perpetrator. His highly personal letter to Cecilia, also produced by Briony before her family members does nothing to help his case. A witness she was: she did see the perpetrator in flagrante delicto, just before he fled. But whether she recognised and identified him in the dark is not quite certain. She is unsure of herself and it is only by tremulously confirming her unnamed suspicions with the victim (who is also unsure), and her own coloured opinion of Robbie that she thinks she is certain about him being the perpetrator.
All this, of course, comes after Cecilia has confronted Robbie with the knowledge of his feelings for her and the fact that Briony has read the letter. Robbie is penitent, Cecilia is vexed, but they declare their unending love for each other despite themselves.
Their togetherness is cut short, as Robbie is convicted of the crime and hauled off by the police.
Thus, the lives of all three of the characters, Robbie, Cecilia and Briony are irrevocably changed.
If it still comes across as too mawkish and melodramatic, that is entirely my fault. Academy Award winner Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel is so lean, it reminds me of venison. And in the hands of young director Joe Wright, it leaps and prances with the serous grace of a gazelle.
Where do I start? How do I even begin to describe Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography which for the first hour evokes the idyllic and utopian vision of the England of Enid Blyton I had since my earliest years? Those images of the still, picturesque heather-covered meadows with their blossoms, people basking in lyrically diffused sunlight, talking leisurely about writing plays, composing poems about woods and brooks and having ices, maids in the scullery stocking up the larder for high teas and feasts at night transported me completely to my childhood imaginings in which I would lose myself. Equally masterful is his depiction of wartime London as observed in the vast, sterilised corridors of its hospitals, overflowing with the casualties of war and the cobbled streets crawling with soldiers and anxious civilians.
But I simply cannot fail to mention the legendary tracking shot of the Dunkirk beach. In just over five minutes, it shows us thousands of lives laid bare, the innumerable repercussions war has on men, and the effect of all this on Robbie. It is one of the most powerfully moving scenes I’ve ever seen on film. It is a virtuoso stand-alone piece that is a movie by itself, a movie that has to be seen to be convinced of its truth.
The score by Dario Marianelli and the haunting piano by Jean-Yves Thibaudet is the stuff of legendary, sweeping epics. Indeed, it is the score which gives the movie its sweep, its grandiosity and its empathetic proximity to the human condition. The music in the tracking shot of Dunkirk elevates it beyond the reach of words, into the realm of pure, instinctive emotion. The use of the flat, slapping sound of the typewriter as percussion is sheer inspired, lunatic genius. Briony’s theme music, to which this piece of percussion is set, is labyrinthine, dizzyingly operatic and weirdly unsettling.
Keira Knightley, in this movie, went from being one of the reasons for my scepticism to one of the reasons I love the British accent (some other reasons being Tom Wilkinson, Ralph Fiennes, Mark Strong). She plays Cecilia as almost a shrew, at the beginning, whose facade of frosty curtness later crumbles pitifully into a vortex of passion and endless longing for Robbie. And, man, with her coldly piercing glare, strident body language and diction that sounds like bullets pinging off metal, she is scary good at it.
James McAvoy, who was bloody impressive in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ comes into his own fully here. Portraying the earnestness and promise of youth and deep love at the start, it is he who later serves both as the eyes and the mirror to the utter destruction wreaked on the soul by war. Yet, it is his soulful eyes that keep the flame of love alight against all odds. In a single scene towards the end, he offers us a virtuoso display of powerhouse acting that induces gooseflesh.
Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave. It took these three formidable actresses to portray Briony Tallis, the bedrock on which this entire saga rests. It is a mark of my ignorance that I wasn’t familiar with either of them, before this movie. Saoirse Ronan’s Briony is an uncommonly precocious young girl. Looking at her, one senses the level of quick intuition and cold, prim intelligence she projects far beyond her years. But it is this extreme intuition coupled with the lack of mature insight and her adolescent turmoil that leads her to her fatal folly of judgement, in a sense. An enormously complex role played with blinding clarity by Saoirse Ronan. Her casting is so perfect that she is the physical embodiment of her character: pale, willowy, with a long, straight, open face bearing divinely curved, aquamarine eyes so clear, they seem transparent to her very soul, and ending with thin, pursed lips and a dainty, pointed chin. Add to that the deliberately severe, just-about-lady-like haircut that accentuates her sharp features with an austere starkness.
Romola Garai plays Briony in her most harrowing phase, both professional and personal. Joining St. Thomas’s Hospital, London as a trainee nurse in the darkest hour of England, she is forced to confront the very worst of human suffering. Yet, she goes about her job with a clenched dignity, masking her utter revulsion and horror. For it is but penance for her, a means to atone or maybe escape from the horror of her own guilt, as it lies heavy on her like never before, in those most hellish of days. Garai has, probably, the most crucial scene in the film, the fulcrum on which the entire saga is hinged, the prism through which the reality of the film is viewed at the end. As a young woman, not too far from her childhood, growing up to fully grasp the implications and ramifications of a childhood act borne out of naivete and misunderstanding, at a time when childhood had to be smothered before its time, she aptly mirrors the feelings of denial, the passive horror of someone who wished she was just an innocent bystander, the journey through the endless tunnel of guilt, the slow coming-to-terms with her own guilt and, finally, the mustering-up of courage to make amends. She is a marvel. If I have waxed so eloquent about Romola Garai, it is entirely her doing.
Vanessa Redgrave has the scene of the final resolution. It is here that this epic reaches its absolute peak in terms of almost everything: narrative, acting, music, direction, editing. The ending is tricky, (maybe too slight a word to describe it, beguiling would be more apt) and this is where Wright’s virtuoso direction surpasses itself. With sentences so eloquent, they could only have been taken from the novel, and a performance so sublime, it could only be worshipped, Vanessa Redgrave, in a mere five minutes makes me weep. Not just out of grief, but out of her (and our) love and passion for the characters, the characters’ love for each other, and the wondrous, transformative power of words, of stories, of imagination.
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