Hearts Break When Guilt Becomes Art

Those who have read Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement” will know that there is a kind of trick, or catch, in the ending that some people find infuriating and some, well, don’t. The same is true of the film version by Christopher Hampton (writer) and Joe Wright (director). Those who were infuriated by the novel will probably be even more infuriated by the movie.I am one such person. Though I thought the book interesting and well written, the ending spoiled it for me. Obviously, I can’t exactly explain why without spoiling it, but I think I can say this much:Mr. Wright, like Mr. McEwan before him, asks us to take fantasy as a consolation or apology for the unbearable poignancy of the story he has to tell.Opening in a British country house in 1935, the story concerns a false accusation brought by Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a 13-year-old girl with an overactive imagination, against a young man named Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), who ends up spending several years in jail as a result.There is also an element of class in the mix. Briony’s family is rich, whereas Robbie is the son of the family’s housekeeper. Briony’s father has paid for Robbie’s education, and the young man has always been treated practically as one of the family. For them to believe Briony’s accusation is also to believe that he has been guilty of monstrous ingratitude to them. On his side of things, Robbie sees the accusation as having been perpetrated by the family’s pampered darling, her native powers of fancy expanded to dangerous proportions by the faux-genteel romance literature she adores and the kind of moralism once associated with the upper classes.On the bare word of such an unreliable witness as that, Briony’s family members are all — except for her older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley) — ready to throw their lowborn hanger-on to the wolves. Robbie has allowed himself to think that his class origins don’t matter to them, but he finds that they do. And how!Briony’s accusation comes simultaneously with Cecilia’s and Robbie’s discovery that they are in love with each other, and it results in Cecilia’s estrangement from the rest of her family.By the time she reaches the age of 18, Briony (now played by Romola Garai) realizes the horrible mistake she has made and the dreadful price Robbie has paid for it. She seeks to make amends, but it is too late.The title, “Atonement,” is therefore ironic. Real atonement for Briony’s sin was impossible, so Mr. McEwan offered us the novel itself, constructed as what Briony would have written after she grew up to become a novelist, as a kind of phantom atonement. What she couldn’t do in her (fictional) life, she could in her (fictional) fiction. The movie goes even further than this by bringing the aged Briony (played now by Vanessa Redgrave), onto a TV talk show to make explicit her view of the redemptive power of art.Of course, if that’s your view as well, a movie offers many more opportunities for the display of highly wrought artistry than does a novel, and Messrs. Hampton and Wright seem to have seized most of them. Extreme close-ups and night scenes with weird lighting effects help to create disorienting, dreamlike effects, as do repeated episodes that relate the same events from different points of view. What really happened? We are meant to be as much in the dark as the characters.On the fateful day that will determine everything that follows, the camera seems drunk on the lushness of its images, drawing out wherever possible the sensuousness of opera (“La Bohème”), smoke, sun, water, sex (suggested), and even typewriting in an extreme close-up of the physical impression of letters — in particular the letters of one word whose galvanizing effect on Briony is what leads to her false certainty — being formed as the keys strike the paper.After Robbie’s arrest, the film cuts to the British evacuation from Dunkirk, five years later, where, after having been released from jail on the outbreak of war, he turns up again. This epic scene naturally produces many spectacular visual effects. Yet even there, the moral clarity usually thought to attend those events is blurred. Everything is reduced to an immediate sensory level.At times it seems that Mr. Wright, like Briony, thinks that by constantly calling our attention to the gorgeousness of his images, he can make us forget, or at least more easily bear, the heartbreak in the narrative it ostensibly serves. But this is art getting above itself. To make the story of Robbie and Cecilia into the story of Briony’s turning her guilt into art is to wrong them again, not to make up for the first wrong.jbowman@nysun.com

Hearts Break When Guilt Becomes Art

Hearts Break When Guilt Becomes Art

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