Atonement

The comedian Eddie Izzard did a sketch where he characterized British films as "A Room With A View With A Staircase And A Pond"-type movies. He said in these movies, "everything's people opening doors." And the ensuing dialogue was, for lack of a better word, subdued: "Oh, I'm - oh, what? Well, I’ve - oh." "What is it, Sebastian? I'm arranging matches." "Well, I - I thought you - ... I'd better go." "Yes, I think you'd better had." That's kind of what "Atonement" is like.

"Atonement" is basically two very different films. It starts as a tale about the unreliability of perceptions, not too unlike documentaries like "After Innocence" and all the stories of people being freed from prison after being convicted based on faulty eyewitness testimony. We see various people at a large English estate before England entered World War II. For the most part, it's rich people being bored. But we also see Briony, a young girl, witness two encounters between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, who looks like a poor man's Russell Crowe. Briony interprets these incidents to show McAvoy is a sex-crazed psychopath. The film then immediately shows the events leading up to these encounters and we see that Briony was mistaken. Then Briony sees another girl being raped and, even though she saw the perpetrator in the dark and only for a split second, she says she believes it was McAvoy. Hmm, was she right? The point of this film can't be whether or not McAvoy did it, because it's pretty obvious who was responsible.

The film next moves to England participating in World War II in France. Briony and Knightley are nurses, and McAvoy is a soldier. With gruesome scenes of war wounds and characters mourning over their lives' turns, the film's theme switches to showing the vicissitudes of fate, how random events can lead to dramatic consequences. "Irreversible" conveyed something similar, but much more memorably and provocatively. But whereas the first half of "Atonement" uses changes in time to further the story, the latter half switches too much between past and present and the device is a crutch more than anything else.

The problem isn't the acting, with decent performances by Knightley and McAvoy. Some decent directing was also present, especially in a several minute shot on a French beach that shows hundreds and hundreds of soldiers going about their daily routine, and is at times comical, nationalistic, terrible, and bewildering. Doesn't quite pack the punch of the long shots in "Children of Men," but it's still good.

The problem is in the story. There's no reason the two halves go together. We watch an hour of rich people being bored, and then we watch how war can be bloody, mundane, and horrific. They have nothing to do with the other. Also, the title begs the question, has the character who has sinned atoned for her sins? The answer is a resounding, unqualified no. It's not even a close call. There's nothing to debate at the end of the movie. Did Briony make up for what she did? No, no, no. So what's the point of this movie?