Atonement (2007, UK/French)
I really need to stop reading books before I see the movie versions. My latest streak (perhaps with the exception of No Country for Old Men) has been awfully disappointing. In the case of Atonement, the filmmakers haven't made a bad film, just a greatly simplified one, with most of the subtlety of Ian McEwan's novel removed.
The bones of the story are still there, of course, and they make for quite a moving melodrama - the romantic scenes between Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy) are particularly good - but it lacks the rich interiority of the book, and can't quite push the deeper themes forward. The end is particularly troubling, as a grown-up Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) basically looks straight at the camera and tells everyone exactly what the whole story was about.
Visually, Atonement is gorgeous. The cinematography, the costumes, the cast, everything is lovely and glowing. Even the horrors of World War II are filmed exquisitely. And that's where I felt another problem. Perhaps it's all too pretty - the story is so much about the grotesque in human behavior, and this is never addressed visually. Even the battlefield and war hospital scenes move quickly past the broken bodies, and one of the most important images in the book - a severed child's leg that Robbie finds in a tree during the English retreat across France - is replaced by a much more palatable (I can't believe I'm saying this) field of dead schoolgirls, laid in perfect lines. I think perhaps that Atonement works best on the surface of things, as a beautiful, tragic love story. The deeper themes never quite gel.
posted by molly m. at 3:28 PM
2 Comments:
as a history buff, I was disturbed by the insertion of the dead schoolgirls who had been murdered. This is an atrocity, the leg in the tree (in the book) is not. Although the Nazis were certainly guilty of atrocities, none took place in France during the 1940 offensive. In fact the soldiers were instructed to behave towards the civilians in anticipation of the coming occupation. They did not want angry partisans. And it basically worked. The french were relatively docile during much of the occupation. pw
4:19 PM
While I am certainly not a scholar of WWII history, I have to say that I consider the leg (any leg) in the tree a pretty atrocious act, even if it was less deliberate than something akin to the field of schoolgirls. But I understand your meaning. My original point was that I believed that the filmmakers made a weak choice. If what you say about historical context is true, that renders that choice even more questionable.
5:59 PM
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