Joe Wright (2007)

I stopped reading Ian McEwan’s fiction years ago:  his self-importance got too much for me, especially when it extended beyond the narrative proper.  Enduring Love (1997) has a couple of appendices, the first purporting to be an academic paper, reprinted from the British Review of Psychiatry, about the medical condition that afflicts one of the novel’s main characters.  The paper is the work of two scientists whose surnames, Wenn and Camia, add up to an anagram of the names of its actual author, bowling us over with his scientific literacy and cunning.  The ballyhoo surrounding the publication of Saturday (2005), whose protagonist is a neurosurgeon, majored on McEwan’s lengthy eye-witness research in the operating theatre at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.  That novel’s timeframe spans a single day – 15 February 2003, the date of the largest public demonstration in British history, against the prospective invasion of Iraq.  Eight years later, McEwan told Channel 4 News that ‘prior to the 2003 invasion he had hoped to be able to seek an audience with Tony Blair to persuade him not to go ahead with the war’ (Wikipedia).  Yes, if that meeting had happened it would have made all the difference – though shouldn’t it have been Tony Blair seeking an audience with Ian McEwan?

Among the four McEwan novel(la)s I did read, Atonement was much better than the two above-mentioned and On Chesil Beach.  Each of Atonement’s three main parts is written in the third person; a ‘Postscript’, in the first person, reveals that Briony Tallis, one of the principals in the preceding story, is actually the author of all three of its parts.  That revelation causes the novel to dwindle rather – into a more academic exercise about the business of writing fiction, the use of unreliable narrators and so on.  Even so, the twist-in-the-tail is more than clever:  when Briony admits she has not been telling the whole truth, the reader really knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of unreliable narration – on McEwan’s part, as well as Briony’s.  On the face of it, Christopher Hampton’s screenplay for Joe Wright’s film of Atonement is faithful to the novel.  It begins with events at an English country house in the mid-1930s, culminating in the perhaps wilfully mistaken testimony of the young-teenage Briony (Saoirse Ronan) that sends an innocent man to prison.  It continues into World War II, when the innocent man, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), is fighting for the British army in the Battle of France and Briony’s elder sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley), who loves Robbie and is loved by him, is a nurse; and into the early post-war years, as Briony (now Romola Garai) tries and fails to ‘atone’ for her teenage error.  It ends with the elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) giving a television interview about her autobiographical novel ‘Atonement’, in which she makes clear that novel’s departures from what actually happened in her life and to Robbie and Cecilia.  As a scenarist, Christopher Hampton is much superior to Ian McEwan (whose screenplays for later film versions of two of his books – On Chesil Beach and The Children Act, both released in 2017 – were ridiculous) but Hampton had an insoluble problem on his hands.  The film of Atonement can’t be faithful to its source material in reproducing the significance of the concluding reveal because Briony can’t meaningfully be, as she could be on the printed page, responsible for the narrative’s earlier parts.

This weakness – in terms of both the lack of immediate impact of Briony’s revelation on screen and what difference it makes to the audience’s retrospective view of preceding events – is far from Atonement‘s only one.  Other defects are more blatant.  The film’s air of self-approval might seem a fitting tribute to McEwan (who was one of its executive producers) but, with Joe Wright at the helm, the virtuosity is less sophisticated – Wright always has an eye on the box office.  For as long as the action is happening at the Tallis family pile, he pushes the sunlit luxury of the period settings for all they’re worth; once country-house costume drama turns into wartime romance, he does the same with that.  Dario Marianelli’s music duly makes emphatically clear the fraught emotions simmering behind the sunshine before morphing into love-story-for-the-ages mode.  Wright’s approach was vindicated – and not just because Atonement, which cost $30m to make, took $131m (Wikipedia figures in February 2024).  The film’s most conspicuously flamboyant elements were also among its most admired.  Marianelli’s insistent score won Atonement its only Oscar.  The outstanding highlight, for many, is DP Seamus McGarvey’s five-minute tracking shot along the sea front at Dunkirk.  Robbie, separated from his army unit, makes his way there on foot, observing the terrible carnage on the beach – and more.  These five minutes are pure showing off by Joe Wright.  One’s sense of the Dunkirk sequence as a performance is reinforced especially by a group of British soldiers on the prom singing ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’:  once they get to the end of the last verse, the soldiers go back to the start of the first verse – as if on a loop.

As the doubly doomed romantic leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are unsatisfying in different ways.  In the first part, Knightley’s rat-a-tat delivery and temperamental brittleness are effective enough.  Later on, her portrait of Cecilia feels hollow though she’s hardly helped by Wright’s taste for kitschy overkill.  As Cecilia tends a mortally wounded French soldier (a cameo from Jérémie Renier), a single teardrop rolls down his cheek, to the accompaniment not of Dario Marianelli but of Claude Debussy (Clair de lune, of course) – after all, the soldier is French … An actress more capable of finding emotional truth than Keira Knightley would struggle to authenticate Cecilia’s reaction to this.  James McAvoy is less comfortable than his co-star with an RP English accent.  That might seem right:  although Robbie, like Cecilia, has recently graduated from Cambridge, he’s the son of the Tallises’ housekeeper (Brenda Blethyn) and his higher education was paid for by Cecilia’s father.  But McAvoy gives the impression of disguising his own Scottish accent rather than his character’s humble origins.  When he expresses emotion, the posh voice slips a bit; when he concentrates on getting the voice right, his line readings tend to lose expression.  Despite this, McAvoy, as usual, acts intelligently and conscientiously.  Also as usual, he lacks dynamism. 

There are lots of other well-known – or soon to be well-known – faces on the screen – Benedict Cumberbatch (as the real culprit in the sexual assault for which Robbie takes the rap), Juno Temple (as Briony’s older cousin, the victim of the assault), Harriet Walter (the Tallis family matriarch), Gina McKee (bizarrely miscast as a no-nonsense nursing sister), Daniel Mays (a fellow soldier in Robbie’s unit).  The acting is really elevated, though, only by the three ages of Briony.  In only her second film role, Saoirse Ronan is a wonder – emotionally precise, effortlessly eccentric, utterly natural.  Ronan’s performance in effect sets Romola Garai a follow-that challenge that Garai meets very well, particularly in capturing the young adult Briony’s ambivalence.  Vanessa Redgrave has much less screen time but great presence as the elderly, terminally ill Briony.  As she speaks to her briefly glimpsed TV interviewer (played by Anthony Minghella, who died only a few months after the release of Atonement), Briony faces the camera.  She explains that her post-war meeting with Robbie and Cecilia never happened:  he died from his wounds at Dunkirk; later in 1940, Cecilia was among the fatalities when a bomb hit Balham tube station, causing a fractured water main to flood the station and drown civilians using it as an air raid shelter.  Speaking to camera in a calm, purposeful voice, Redgrave is compelling; it’s a bad mistake to interrupt her with flashbacks to Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths.  Wright’s spectacular, bombastic flooding of the tube station is phony enough to eclipse any of the fictional inventions that Briony is admitting.

Sally and I saw Atonement in the cinema on its original release.  Watching it again now on television was a reminder not just of the mostly over-enthusiastic reception of the film back in 2007 but also of the excited predictions made then, in the British media at least, for the bright young stars involved, on both sides of the camera.  Joe Wright was in only his mid-thirties, James McAvoy in his mid-twenties and Keira Knightley just twenty-one; Saoirse Ronan was twelve.  In the years since, none of these four has sunk without trace but only one has come to be recognised as a real screen artist – the right one, thank goodness.  If Atonement hadn’t supplied Saoirse Ronan’s breakthrough role something else probably would have, and soon.  You can’t be sure, though.  The film that launched this brilliant actress is, whatever its shortcomings, a film to be grateful for.

8 February 2024