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| Atonement |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 130 |
| Public Rating: 0.00 (0 votes) |
Director: Joe Wright |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 2007 |
| Writer(s): Christopher Hampton, Ian McEwan |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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Oh, let’s get this over with. I’ve been timecoding and re-editing and subtitling my own goddamn movie for weeks now and I’m way behind on these stupid reviews. So let’s do this.
Summary: a spoiled 13-year-old girl (3 different actresses) tells a lie and her sister’s (Keira Knightley) boyfriend (James McAvoy) off to fight in WWII.
Okay... “Atonement.” A valiant attempt at combining Oscar-bait with avant-garde. It’s an uncomfortable movie, not because of what happens, but because of how it’s told, like we’re always hopping from foot-to-foot, like we have to pee. Fragmentary. It leaves the characters distant, and leaves us feeling not like we’re in the hands of a master but at the behest of someone very unsure of what he’s trying to do.
It’s Oscar-bait all right. Overscored, stilted dialogue, overly reliant on narration, melodramatic, and like much overpraised Oscar-bait very little actually happens. Like other recent Oscar-bait period pieces (think “The Hours”) our cameraman can’t hold still to save his life, yet very little of his agitation seems to be for a purpose, just something to do. Cameras sweep and violins shriek because...well, we can’t hold still, can we?
And of course it ends with someone talking directly to the camera, explaining it all, while soppy music plays in the background. And there are some calculated Oscar-bait “shocks!” like an exposed brain, like when in “Dances With Wolves” soldiers used Dunbar’s diary as toilet paper, etc.
Yet there are some fantastic edits in “Atonement,” in which characters have suddenly made quick hops back in time to repeat what we’ve just seen from a different POV, and I like how there’s so little to-do to let us know we’re hopping in time. The inter-cutting between McAvoy typing and Keira getting ready for the party is pretty neat. That’s what I mean by an avant-garde movie.
The first act is best, even though while I was watching it I just felt uncomfortable, as emotions simmer in a big English country house. There’s a world of difference between how the little girl in “Atonement” can never know the lovers, who exist behind glass in a rarefied, passionate air, and how the little girl in “Days of Heaven” can never know the lovers, whose hushed story is always a room away.
McAvoy is good in a distant, intense way; Knightley is adequate as always and, as FilmFreak Central put it, continues to act through her chin. As the spoiled girl, “Atonement” belongs to Saoirse Ronan and Romola Garai, comically dressed and haired the same over the course of like 80 years. I like that “Atonement” gives value to adolescent (or even pre-adolescent) sexual longing. And I could go off on great lengths about whether a role is supporting or lead; Saoirse plays the main character, but since that main character is divided among 3 different actresses, they only get to be supporting actresses at the Oscars. Is that a review? I guess.
Finished Friday, February 29, 2008
Copyright (c) 2008 Friday & Saturday Night
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