http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRolm4oSSw0&feature=relatedAs the more attentive Vox Nova readers may have gathered, I have been offering reviews of this year’s Best Picture nominees in anticipation of the upcoming Academy Awards show (previous installments here, here, here, and here). All of the other nominated films I liked. Atonement I did not. I found the film boring, languid, full of long shots of long faces and missed opportunities.
The story, I thought, had potential. Atonement’s protagonist, Briony Tallis, is at the beginning of the film a young adolescent from an upper middle class English family living in the countryside prior to World War II. When she observes the – let’s call it euphemistically – “budding romance” between her older sister and the son of one of the servants, she attaches a sinister significance to the event and takes action in a misguided attempt to help her sister which ends up throwing all of their lives into chaos.
Done properly, the film could have been an interesting mediation on the nature of moral responsibility and ignorance, of doing a small wrong to try and punish a larger wrong, and about the possibility of reconciliation and atonement for wrongs done (the title of the film, at any rate, suggests this later theme). The movie, however, is content to largely gesture at these themes briefly before moving on to something else.
Frankly, I ended up feeling rather sorry for Briony. The film treats her as having committed some unspeakable evil, yet largely ignores both the reduced culpability of her actions due to ignorance as well as any role the actions of the other characters may have played in their troubles. Ultimately, though, even she is not terribly admirable. Having told a lie that started the whole mess, she attempts to “fix” the situation by telling another lie, albeit one that actually has no chance of making anything better, but only of easing her troubled conscience. “I had for a very long time decided to tell the absolute truth,” she says toward the end of the film, “But the effect of all this honesty was rather… pitiless, you see. I couldn’t any longer imagine what purpose would be served by it.” In this she seemed to echo the words of Pontius Pilate, who dismissively asked “what is truth?” while the Truth was standing right in front of him. Pilate went off, missing the actual atonement, but I’m afraid there is no atonement either in or for this film. All that remains is the cold verdict of justice, which like a Roman spectator at the colosseum, is a thumbs down (and if you think that metaphor was overwrought, wait till you see the film).
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