Notes on Atonement

? 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 .