Atonement

Let's get the obvious out of the way - The film is beautiful and lyrical. Joe Wright has technically developed from Pride and Prejudice in that he has made his camera a commentator in the film's world than just a recorder. He does well to pin point the camera as the gager of young Briony's imaginative thoughts. Parts of the romance are even inviting and charming.

The bigger interest, for me, lays in the structural situation. Joe Wright seemingly adapts the novel true to its original form. The story is a self reflective, post modernist comment on a classical love story. As the film tells the story of Cecilia and Robbie and their unhopeful romance, evidence starts to come through that their tale is fictional. The whole story comes out though when Briony is interviewed at an older stage and admits the story being told has been done so in her mind and is part of a final novel she is writing.

the admittance of the title to describe the film being shown relates back to meta fiction, but it is also a structural comment on our association with love stories to make tragedies have new meaning. Her character can't make her sister and her lover come back to life and live out their lives, but she can make them have the ending they deserved in her new novel. She describes this as good for them, but it is really help herself deal with the guilt of how she split them up.

The idea is a fascinating one, but the film doesn't take it far enough for serious study. Our objective of the real Briony exists in the fable she tells. We get a new perspective on her in the interview, but that is all. The more interesting portrait would have been to detail her life more and how she coped with the guilt over the years, but we get a film that is suppose to be geniune all the way through and then throws over the veil at the end to reveal its secret, but it's not enough. Swimming Pool also did this with a mystery story, but lacked true interest because it didn't relate how it was meaningful to the main protaganist for her to make up this story. It expected us to be wowed by a plot device that isn't even that novel.

Atonement is better than Swimming Pool because we do relate the reasons and meaning back to Briony's desire to make her past wrongs right, but the film lacks a sufficient investigation of the fable and the reality because it puts so much emphasis on the fictionalized love story of Cecilia and Robbie. Many people will judge this film by how convincing their love story is when it was meant to exist on a lower level of importance because the greatest tragedy really resides in Briony. We just don't get enough of her feelings.