Atonement (Widescreen Edition)
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Movie Reviews of Atonement (Widescreen Edition)
Movie Review: A Lot of Stir
Summary: 3 Stars
"Atonement" has pleasant moments. I didn't enjoy it very much, but I think it probably is good. Saoirse Ronan who was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress as the young Briony Tallis does an excellent job of creating a lot of stir. Ramola Garai takes over as Briony at age 18 and does a good job of trying to atone for her actions as a young girl. Vanessa Redgrave is excellent, albeit in a thankless role, as Briony right before her death. Redgrave has been nominated for Oscars for "Morgan!" (1966), "Isadora" (1968), "Mary Queen of Scots" (1971), "The Bostonians" (1984), and "Howard's End" (1992). She won a supporting Oscar in 1977 for "Julia." I have been watching her captivating performance in Evening. As the aging author telling this tale, she is reduced to a TV interview show format. Keira Knightly who was nominated for an Oscar for "Pride & Prejudice" in 2005 looks good. James McAvoy, who plays Robbie Turner, was nominated by the British Academy Awards & the Golden Globes for this film. He had previously been nominated for an Oscar in the powerful The Last King of Scotland (Widescreen Edition). He's always very good in his films; however "Atonement" keeps him rather boxed in emotionally, despite the excellent scenes in the war. Brenda Blethyn plays his mother Grace Turner in a nice cameo. The best performance of the film for me was in the cameo of Jeremie Renier as Luc Cornet, a French soldier who dies from a scull injury in front of Briony. It's a short but powerful performance. Belgian Renier was nominated as Best Actor by the European Film Awards for L' enfant (The Child) in which he sells his baby. In "Atonement," he is touching with his mind going between memory and the present.
My greatest disappointment with "Atonement" was the screenplay which tries to be clever by jumping back and forth with flashbacks and giving us only part of the story to be unhooked at the director's discretion. Thus, rather than just telling a fairly interesting tale, we must wonder at how clever the screenwriter was. It doesn't work and the final scenes like the flooded tunnel come as downer footnotes. If depressing cinema is your forte, get your hanky for this one. The performances and cinematography, however, are exquisite. Enjoy!
Movie Review: a boring Atonement
Summary: 2 Stars
I really wanted to like this film because of the actors involved in it. James McAvoy,who was excellent in "The Last King of Scotland" & "Narnia", Keira Knightly, and Vanessa Redgrave were the lures here plus the film had received excellent reviews. However, the direction was plodding and that was a big surprise to me because I had liked Joe Wright's direction in the previous film to this, "Pride & Prejudice" also with Keira Knightley. Because of this and despite McAvoy's and Redgrave's excellent acting, I felt disengaged from the film. Also Knightley somehow lacks that "something" that made the late Audrey Hepburn magnetic and so I felt little of McAvoy's passion for her because of this. So regretfully, 2 stars which means okay but no bonnets for this very over-rated film (check out "The French Lieutenant's Woman" for comparison).
Movie Review: Another Jigsaw Puzzle
Summary: 3 Stars
A lot of recent movies have tried to create suspense by telling their stories in bits and pieces. Flashbacks and flash-forwards abound. With "Atonement," we get a number of these time displacements, plus we have the added fragmentation of a story sometimes told from different viewpoints, in brief imitation of "Roshomon."
The Director apparently hoped to hold our interest by making archeologists of us all, uncovering one shard after another, engaging us, challenging us to put the pieces together into the final unified piece of pottery. Half-way through though, I felt as if there might just be too many missing pieces here to warrant my continued efforts.
Another problem with the movie is that it set up false expectations. Its backdrops don't quite match its theme. The central tragedy of the film is launched in the 1930's in a large English estate taken right out of the pages of a classic Agatha Christie who-dun-it. There are long corridors and balconies, all slightly darkened, all gleaming sinisterly with polished wood. In standard Christie-style, some members of the upper-class gather here for a house party where they mingle with gardeners, butlers, and other factotums of the estate. The standard illicit love affairs, rivalries, and tensions brew among this cast of characters. All this leads the viewer to expect a neatly clipped murder in the library.
However, while there is a crime committed, and while there is some question about who did it - the mystery is not at all the sort of puzzled contrivance that we have been set up for. The viewer is all of a sudden shifted into the very much less contained, much less solvable gore of the WWII evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk. From there, we're launched onto a sea of murky moral considerations and motives.
The result is a somewhat pretentious collage of mismatched fragments that it gets a chore to relate and relate to. There might have been a good point buried here, about the inscrutability of a lot of human motivation and about how an off-the-cuff deception can lead to hugely tragic consequence. But that worthwhile theme seems to get lost in the battlefield smoke of Dunkirk.
Movie Review: Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
I had neither read the book nor read any film review of "Atonement" before I saw it on DVD. I was aware that Ian McEwan is a celebrated modern author but little else. In short, I saw this film with absolutely no preconceived ideas.
"Atonement" is an absolutely captivating film. Initially, it seemed like an English period piece. Yet, gradually it revealed an enthralling plot. A young girl's misconstrued evidence before the police results in life changing events for the film's main characters. The backdrop is the 1930s and then the Second World War before the full story is revealed in the current day.
Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are brilliant as the lead characters. Their
two characters are the love interest of the film. Although they both come from
very different backgrounds, their attraction to each other is obvious. The outset of the film, in particular, has real sexual frisson. Their lives, however, are soon torn asunder.
At the conclusion of the film there is a wonderful cameo piece by Vanessa Redgrave. It is her character that ties up all the loose ends. And these ends are very sad indeed. I'll say no more for fear of spoiling the film for others.
"Atonement" won the Golden Globe Award for best film. This was well warranted. The film is a masterpiece.
Movie Review: Very high level of accomplishment from a very young director
Summary: 5 Stars
To put it simply, this is an amazing film, wrenching, mesmerizing, beautiful, and painful, alternating poetry and brutality. It's a story of self-righteous misunderstanding and unreliable narration (on several levels), in which the events an overly impressionable young girl witnesses lead to the destruction of two lives -- three, if you count her own life. And, like the book, the ending, in which Briony, now on the verge of death, tells the interviewer the truth she couldn't quite tell in her novel (she's not really very brave), is upsetting and painful as well. There are no clean endings in real life. The screenplay is beautifully written, and extremely close to the novel -- closer than I would have thought possible, in fact. Keira Knightley is very good as Cecelia, though she doesn't really get a chance to emote in this role, Cecelia being a rather closed-off sort of person. James McAvoy nails the part of Robbie Hunter, unjustly imprisoned on Briony's testimony and the victim of class differences -- especially in the scenes in northern France, after the bitter years of imprisonment have taken their toll. But Saoirse Ronan turns in the best work in the film as the thirteen-year-old Briony. Romola Garai is pretty good, too, as Briony at eighteen, and Vanessa Redgrave is competent in her brief section as the aging Briony. I can't think of another film in which the same character at three widely different ages, played by three actresses, has been so well developed. There's even a considerable physical resemblance among them. This is a far from light-hearted romance, or even a standard war story, and you won't forget it for a long, long time.