In Sight/ Cinema & Arts: Ambiguity remains in beautifully captured tale of morality

ATONEMENT

Opens April 12 ・123 minutes

・Theatre Times Square in Tokyo and elsewhere

It's 1935 at a lavish mansion in the English countryside. By all appearances, it's a life of idyll, but from the moment you hear how the whirring of a typewriter is worked into the soundtrack, you sense this is going to be a movie of unrelenting suspense. As the typewriter suggests, the film adaptation of "Atonement," directed by Joe Wright and based on the novel by Ian McEwan, is about creating stories; more specifically, how fabricating one tale can destroy lives, and leave the author of the lie atoning for the rest of her life.

From the moment we first see Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan playing the role at 13, followed by Romola Garai at 18), it's obvious she's an intense young woman. At 13, she fancies herself a budding playwright, churning out tales of love, betrayal and redemption. She clacks away on her typewriter, marches through the house with military-sharp turns at each corner, and is a fierce, if endearing, force to be reckoned with among her family.

Fear of war seems far away from the Tallis mansion. Life is bucolic, if boring, for Briony and her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley, who also starred in Wright's 2005 movie, "Pride & Prejudice"), a 23-year-old at loose ends after graduating from university.

The first portion of the film takes place during one day, as the events of the afternoon ominously build to the evening's disastrous end. Briony witnesses a charged exchange from her window between Cecilia and Robbie (James McAvoy,

"The Last King of Scotland"), Cecilia's schoolmate and the Tallis family's gardener. The intensity and poetry of the scene as described in McEwan's novel is translated to film in exquisite detail, even down to the mole on Cecilia's back.

Briony, confused by what she witnesses between her sister and Robbie, is suspicious. When Robbie later gives her a note to pass to Cecilia, we know things will not end well. When Robbie realizes he's picked up the wrong note from his desk--a crude rough draft, intended for no one--it is already too late.

From here, things only go downhill, save for a beautifully interpreted, sensual interlude between Robbie and Cecilia in the library.

Unlike the preachy fairy tales Briony spends her summer days writing, the lie she will eventually tell on that summer day is objectively immoral, a surprisingly vicious act for a 13-year-old. After becoming initially sympathetic to her character, the viewer learns that her intense demeanor belies a devastating capacity for stubborn revenge.

In the midst of all this, there is additional treachery between Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch), a visiting family friend, and Lola, (Juno Temple), Briony's teenage cousin. What transpires between the two is an integral part of the catastrophe that culminates that evening. Temple successfully captures the cavalier, vulnerable sides of Lola, while Cumberbatch's sleazy portrayal of Paul is good enough to make you feel sick.

When the night is over, all lives have been irreversibly altered, and Briony will have to live the rest of hers trying to come to terms with what she has done.

Following the slow unfolding of the events of this fateful day, the movie becomes more abrupt, skipping between time and place. Cecilia and Briony both become nurses in the war, while Robbie spends his days fighting for the British army, his only alternative to jail. Before Robbie is sent to France, he and Cecilia have a brief reunion. The strength and selflessness of their love for each other is evident in this powerful exchange, both in how Cecilia has waited for him and defied her family, and in how Robbie initially tries to convince her to go on with her life.

The scenes that follow, particularly the war scenes, reflect a sensitivity to detail that does justice to the scope of research that typifies McEwan's novels. The scenes of Dunkirk, France, where British soldiers waited for boats to return to England after fleeing France, poignantly depict how Ferris wheels and beach cafes were transformed into a background of surreal props for wounded, disenchanted soldiers.

Just as McEwan relies on ambiguity to lend his novel its potency, the film's ending leaves the viewer reevaluating previous scenes, trying to ascertain what did and didn't happen. In this ingenious way, the viewer's own reflection on the veracity of previous scenes mirrors the constant turmoil and introspection that Briony, Cecilia and Robbie have had to endure since that ruinous summer day in 1935.

By the time we see Briony as an elderly woman (Vanessa Redgrave) in 1999, still coming to terms with her past sin and now facing her own mortality, we're not sure what to think. Has she atoned, after all these years?

Beautifully shot and creatively rendered, the film, like the book, leaves you achingly wistful and disturbingly murky on ethical questions of forgiveness and redemption.(IHT/Asahi: March 28,2008)