In the January issue of Commentary, there’s a fascinating article called “Stem Cells and the President—An Inside Account,” written by Jay Lefkowitz, who was the official “primarily responsible for advising the President” on the issue of stem cells during the debates that produced Bush’s compromise in the summer of 2001.

In “Stem Cells and the President,” Lefkowitz writes, “Now that the debate seems to be over, what can we say about Bush’s policy and the long months it took for him to devise it? I think it is fair to look upon it as a model of how to deal with the complicated scientific and ethical dilemmas that will continue to confront political leaders in the age of biotechnology.”

That’s a large claim, and it requires not only thinking about how recent breakthroughs have changed the debate but also remembering what the situation was like in 2001. There’s a touch of beyondism in the Commentary piece—a bit of the move that suggests “We must have been correct because we were attacked from both the left and the right.” It’s true, for example, that Judie Brown, the president of the American Life League, told the New York Times that after the stem-cell compromise in 2001 President Bush could “no longer describe himself as pro-life.” But if being attacked at some point by the hard-line American Life League is the criterion, few of us would qualify as pro-life.

For that matter, the two sides would gradually change their opinions in opposite directions: Many on the supporters of stem-cell researcher—including, as Lefkowitz notes, the actor Christopher Reeve and Irving Weissman of Stanford—began with mild praise of the decision and moved over the next three years to raging opposition.

Meanwhile, the compromise was generally received with mild disappointment by the pro-life side (including by First Things, which characterized the compromise as “morally defensible in principle but gravely imprudent.”) But the political left increasingly decided the issue was a winning one, and their attacks on President Bush escalated until, at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, the phrase stem cells was spoken from the dais dozens of times, in nearly every major speech—while the word abortion was never heard. The effect of all this work by the left was that, across the nation, Bush’s 2001 position was no longer understood as a compromise. The Democrats insisted it was a complete surrender to a pro-life extremism, and the nation, I think, came to believe the Democrats (and voted, one notes, for President Bush over John Kerry anyway—or, perhaps, voted for Bush precisely because of what it perceived as the president’s enduring pro-life stand).

Still, Lefkowitz is basically right about the reaction to the president’s address on August 9, 2001: It pleased no one particularly at the time. He attributes the president’s position to Bush’s courage in 2001, but, the man’s courage may have been better displayed by the fact that Bush stuck to his compromise even as the Democrats and the mainstream media ginned the issue up into one of the major themes of the elections of 2004, 2006, and 2008. Or, rather, what was going to be one of the major issues of the 2008 election, until this year’s breakthroughs suddenly changed the entire landscape of the debate—and gave an enormous victory to the pro-life side.

Let’s think for a moment, however, about the 2001 compromise. We tend to forget that confusion and disorganization in the first days of the Bush administration helped produce the original political crisis over stem cells: An executive order, issued in the first flurry of such orders as the new administration took office, might well have passed without comment for some time.

Once the issue was on the table, however, Bush was forced to act in the full glare of publicity. It’s easy to accept Lefkowitz’s claim that the 2001 compromise seemed the clearest solution at the time. But Lefkowitz makes too easy an elision to move from there to the claim that the recent breakthroughs are a vindication of Bush’s 2001 position—for that would require showing that the new results would not have happened, or would have happened slower, if Bush had instead refused to fund even previously created stem-cell lines.

Meanwhile, it’s not as though Bush’s compromise bought him much respite from attacks by the pro-research world or the political left. And though his speech on August 9, 2001, was a brilliant one, he missed—as he has often missed during his presidency—the chance to educate the public on the deeper pro-life position.

And yet, along the way, the public did get educated. The political left’s endless attacks on the 2001 compromise made it seem less of a compromise and more of an entirely pro-life stand. And then the new breakthroughs suddenly stranded the attackers in odd and unsustainable positions. Lefkowitz is surely right that all this marks a great triumph for President Bush. But it is one with many twists and turns between 2001 and 2007.

• It’s late thirties England and a little rich girl named Briony Tallis with an overlarge vocabulary and pretensions to literary greatness tells a big fat lie to the police and ruins the life of her sister’s love interest (James McAvoy) because, well, she’s got a crush on him too, and he’s just a working-class mope who’s gotten above his station, and the upper-crusties are like that, you know . . .

• Filler filler filler World War Two filler filler filler beaches of Dunkirk filler filler fantasy bits filler filler.

• For some strange reason, one of George Romero’s living dead is cast as older version of little rich girl filler filler tippy typee at the typewriter filler filler.

• Vanessa Redgrave is little rich girl all grown up and waxing pretentious about art as her only means of atonement.

• I forgot what loud and extraordinarily violent contraptions typewriters were. There also was no delete button.

• Some nice performances, some nice window dressing of British soldiers frolicking on the beach—and all of it as shallow as a finger sandwich what’s been sat on.

• We’re expected to feel puddles of pity for McAvoy, the Tallis’ gardener’s son, a character we’ve barely been given time to know. That was problem number one. Problem number two is that we’re then expected to go all gooey because he was given a choice between staying in prison for a crime he didn’t commit (the rape of a young girl staying on the Tallis estate) and fighting the Germans. So he chooses a uniform over a prison jumper and we’re exposed to the horrors of war—something hundreds of thousands of others are experiencing right along with him for something they never did.

• Had McAvoy’s character never been imprisoned in the first place, he most probably would have wound up in a uniform and on the front anyway. The one thing he is subjected to directly because of the injustice that has been done to him is time in prison. And that’s the one thing we never see. One sentence escapes him about how awful prison was—and, as it turns out, he never uttered it! (You have to see the movie, assuming I haven’t put you off, to understand how that works itself out.)

• Perhaps the Second World War never really happened. Perhaps it was all made up in little Briony’s head, a way to reinvent herself as someone who joined the Nurses Corp and did “her part” for “our boys.”

• Want to show what one little lie can do to the wrong person cast among the wrong set of the effete elite? Then make the film about McAvoy’s time among hardcore criminals—not among the expeditionary forces in France! (Of course, that would have entailed a complete conconstruction of the book on which the film is based, something the book’s author might not have appreciated.)

• Speaking of whom, Ian McEwan was interviewed recently and asked about the whole idea of atonement:

It seems to me that the impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist. Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.

Not necessarily. Faith in itself is not easy to sustain. Well, we won’t get into that.

Yes, quite, we won’t get into that, because all the movie offers us is a variation on how fantasy is our only retreat in a meaningless universe devoid of notions of ultimate justice—in this life and the next. This is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point redivivus.

• Keira Knightley is also in Atonement. She plays Briony’s older sister and McAvoy’s lover. She looks mortally wounded and very thin throughout. She also dives into a fountain in her bloomers.

• I swear, There Will Be Blood had better live up to its reviews or the only thing I’m left with for Best Picture of the Year is Mr. Bean’s Holiday.