ATONEMENT (R)  ****

 

Directed by Joe Wright. 123 minutes.

Starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Blethyn, Saoirse Ronan and Romola Garai. Released by Focus Features.

 

It’s a rare thing when a great modern novel gets turned into a great film, but director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) has done just that with his adaptation of author Ian McEwan’s masterpiece Atonement. Although the film leaves out large chunks of the relatively short, but filled, 2002 novel, Wright deftly captures the spirit of the novel, all the while making the story all his own through his haunting use of photography, editing, score – you name it. McEwan’s novel was a heartbreaking, deeply moving, epic about misunderstanding and innocence lost and the film aptly reflects those ideas through images, both subtle and sweeping, in a variety of setups that begin at a secluded mansion and end on a TV talk show.

 

For those who have not read the novel, and I suggest that you should, the setup is this: precocious 13-year-old Briony Tallis has just written her first play in time for guests who will be arriving for a weekend stay, which would include older brothers and a slightly disconcerting friend of theirs who might or might not have his eyes on Briony’s young cousin. The trouble all starts when Briony, who thinks she knows more about the world than she actually does, spots her beautiful sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley, in her best performance to date), flirting and even more as the evening progresses with servant boy Robbie Turner (the ubiquitous but always a pleasure to watch James McAvoy). Robbie later makes a mistake when he sends a letter – the wrong one, mind you - to Cecilia via Briony. The note contains a word that sends Briony reeling and forming all sorts of suspicions about the handsome Robbie, who has been invited to dine with the Tallis family.

 

Unfortunate things happen – Briony catches the two lovers going at it in the library, a young girl is sexually assaulted and tensions mount – and Robbie ends up being taken away by the police. “Come back to me,” Cecilia whispers to her love as he is cuffed and driven to prison. Four years pass and Robbie is fighting in World War II in exchange for serving jail time. Cecilia is working on the front as a nurse and so is Briony, who has only begun to understand the consequences of her bad judgment. In one of the film’s more powerful moments, Briony holds the hand of a dying French soldier and tells the boy, who has mistaken her for a fiancé, that she loves him. The once precocious girl, now 18, has begun her lifetime of repentance.

 

The film is loaded with remarkable sequences, including the aforementioned bedside moment, a knockout tracking shot of British soldiers sitting on the beach following an invasion of Germany, a bus pulling off with Cecilia aboard, the entire first half of the film in which the quaint Tallis house goes from being a secluded paradise to a creepy, shadow filled Xanadu and, last but not least, an invocation later in the film of Cecilia’s early plea for Robbie to return to her, but this time used in a different, much more devastating, context.

 

The film is deeply sad in so many ways, but Wright does not allow the story to wallow in it. This is a film of redemption, regardless of whether or not it comes too late. The photography here, from haunting sunsets over Europe as WW II rages on to burnt out cities, is among the best of the year and the pace moves slowly, but in a tension building manner. So many films that are adapted from modern great novels – many of which, I grant you, are good in a respectful sort of way, if not great – try too hard to mimic the tone of the book’s author without really injecting into them their own ideas or thematic interests (see No Country for Old Men as the perfect example of a film that bucks that system). But Wright hits the mark here, even if it would seem pretty damn near impossible to equal the complexity and emotional punch of McEwan’s novel. Much like Jonathan Demme’s much underappreciated adaptation of Beloved, the film does not quite rise to the level of the book, but it is great all the same.