This is a guest post from Marcia Herring.
I’d like to start this review with a confession: Atonement is the second book in my long history of reading that has made me so angry, so upset, that I literally threw it across the room.
My anger was directed at the narrator, Briony Tallis, who I had no idea was pulling the strings of the story I had grown so engrossed in, the story that, had I stepped back for one moment, I would have realized was being shaped and tugged by an even larger narrator.
First published in 2001 by Ian McEwan (author of one of my favorite gender-questioning novels
The Cement Garden), Atonement was adapted to film by Joe Wright in 2007 (he’d previously directed
Pride & Prejudice and has since directed
Hanna). I’d heard of the novel sort of peripherally, “Oh, everyone’s reading it! You’ve got to!” and as consequence, avoided it until forced to indulge for a class and found myself (cliché alert) unable to put it down.
Both as an Academy Award-nominated (and winning, for soundtrack) film and as a book adaptation, Joe Wright’s Atonement succeeds. The film is a gorgeous and gritty, if frustrating, portrait of childhood, of war, of love, of lies and the lies one tells to correct them.
The first section of the film and novel set up the plot. The wealthy Tallis family has temporary custody of their lesser-off red-headed cousins, the Quinceys, and young Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is determined to lead them all in a play to celebrate her older brother Leon’s homecoming. Mother Tallis is sick in bed, and older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is awkward around the son of the Tallis’s lawn worker, Robbie (James McAvoy) and excited to hear that her brother is coming home, despite news that he’s bringing along a friend, cocky Paul Marshall.
Briony lives in a world saturated with innocence. She still writes fairy tales, slaying imaginary dragons in the tall grass. The politics of childhood become confused with budding sexuality–something that Briony witnesses in cousin Lola, and becomes obsessed and terrified with an encounter she witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie. This desire for her own sexual awakening and simultaneously not being ready for it leads to Briony witnessing and misunderstanding the encounter at the fountain, the stark near-nudity of her sister, the tableau of Robbie standing by, the broken vase.
In direct contrast to this innocence comes Paul Marshall, introduced as a dapper gentleman who intends to make money off of the war with his Army Amo chocolate bar factory. He descends upon the safe haven of the nursery where Lola is meant to be watching over her twin brothers. “You have to bite it,” he says, handing her a bar of chocolate, his face stony.
The sexuality, too, of Robbie has another angle. His attempts at a polite apology devolve quickly into crude sexual expression. Robbie is faced with the sheer absurdity and irrationality of expressing sexual attraction to one who is of a higher class. Paul Marshall experiences the opposite problem, his power over Lola used to his advantage as he inflicts first rough treatment and then a rape in the woods. That power keeps Lola from seeing the truth, that she has been mistreated, brutally; Paul Marshall keeps Lola at his side, and she eventually marries him.
Mistaken perception continues as the plot device for the first section of the film, as Briony intercepts a note from Robbie to Cecilia–the word “cunt” startling her into dangerous assumption–and interprets a hasty sexual encounter between them as rape. She tells Lola that she has read “the worst word you could possibly imagine,” the idea of desiring or expressing desire after such a secret and surely filthy part is appalling to Briony, more appalling perhaps than accepting innocence or guilt, more appalling than recognizing shades of gray. As cousin Lola is, nigh simultaneously to the romantic scene, being raped by Paul Marshall, the twins go missing and Robbie tracks them down. Because of his absence and because of her surety that Robbie’s crude note was that of a “sex maniac,” Briony accuses Robbie of Lola’s rape. Surely his wildly expressed sexual appetite is equal to and capable of no less than rape. There must be a villain, there is in all of Briony’s fairy tales, and that villain appears to be Robbie.
What follows is Rob and Briony’s means of atoning for their crimes. Rob, unable to fight the accusation against the wealthy and certain young Tallis, is sentenced to prison and then to fight in WWI. Briony, realizing years later that there were cracks in what she witnessed, that there are, perhaps, alternate truths, becomes a nurse in an attempt to undo some of the wrong she has inflicted upon Cecilia and Robbie.
On the issue of alternate truths, it is nearly impossible to discuss
Atonement without discussing its construction, and therefore, its twist ending.
Atonement is a movie directed by a man, adapted from a book by a man, about and concerning a woman and her version of the story of her sister and a man they both knew. To say there are layers of subterfuge to consider is an understatement.
A story is being crafted, an attempt to fill in the blanks. An attempt to create rational cause and effect as happens in all stories when we are young. An attempt to understand what must be truly random and unpredictable. Motive must be established.
But of course, things don’t follow a logical order. The wrong person is blamed for a tragedy while another gets off scot-free. War happens and the best and worst of us are lost, caught in causes we might not respect ourselves. Illness, a car crash, a lightning strike. Do we blame Briony, then, for trying to set order in her confusing world? Do we blame her for attempting to set things right that she helped to set wrong? I remember upon first completing the novel, my rage was so complete, so strong. I hated Briony for what she had done, for creating ugly and beautiful lies to cover up the truth, for believing that life was as simple as “Yes. I saw him with my own eyes.” I hated Briony for the very reasons that I love reading and watching films: writers and directors create lies for us, and we indulge in them. Fiction is called such for a reason–it isn’t real.
And as much as we would like to believe Briony’s version of events, as much as we sit, dutiful audience members and readers, we know simultaneously that life is not that simple. It is not as simple as letting oneself fall into a pond and be saved by the handsome hero. Romantic notions of rescue and war come with real danger–something which the film explores with gusto. Countless romantic tales, such as the sort that Briony is enamored with, feature a hero away at war, returning to his true love. But that is simply that: a story and one we buy into with such eagerness that it is easy for Briony, for McEwan, for Wright to pull the wool over our eyes. We want to believe that Robbie lives, that he and Cecilia are reunited, that Briony somehow makes peace with what she has done. At the end of the film, older Briony states in an interview that she could no longer find any use for honesty or reality, but where do the lies actually come in to play? As moviegoers, we anticipate a story. We know that story is not real. So what makes Briony’s betrayal any different?
The soundtrack, interlaced with the sounds of a typewriter, never lets us completely forget that this is a story that is being crafted. It is no mistake that the first shot of the movie is Briony typing away at her play, “The Trials of Arabella,” taking her work very seriously. Briony expresses the difficulty of writing: that a play depends on other people.
The difference between play and story, as Briony postulates, are similar to the difference between novel and film. McEwan spends pages describing the intricacies of the vase, complete and then broken, whereas in a film, the vase is simply there. A long camera shot transports the viewer from room to room; instead of the turn of pages, the soundtrack interacts with the actions on screen instead of, for example, a rowdy neighbor or interrupting child pulling attention from the work.
While it is, in a way, refreshing to give the narrative over so completely to a woman in what is most certainly not a “chick flick,” and while Cecilia appears to be a strong, fierce woman in charge of her own sexuality, and while Briony, if not the most trustworthy of narrators, is more than skilled enough to do the job of telling this story, both of their stories center around Robbie. Even small conversations between Briony and Cecilia, Briony and Lola, Briony and a young nurse at training devolve quickly into a discussion of Leon, or Robbie, or marriage.
Briony’s obsession with atonement, with losing herself in the quest to right the wrongs she has committed is decidedly un-feminist. Though this is, essentially, Briony’s story, her story is consumed with the stories of others, so much so that she undergoes an erasure of self to ensure the happiness of her protagonists. Briony has been stuck for her whole life revising and rewriting her story, trapped in her youth (her hair-style remains the same), only able to present the truth upon her death, and even then her tidied up version of the truth.
Any deconstruction of the traditional romantic narrative does have the potential to be feminist, however in this case, because the story is filtered not only through Briony Tallis’s obsession with that very narrative but through a male author and director, the deconstruction is seen as a loss of something good. A loss of cherished innocence, of childlike femininity.
There is no denying the technical mastery of Atonement. Simply look at the long shot as Robbie arrives at Dunkirk, despair and small hope surrounding him and swooning around him as the camera floats through soldiers waiting. Look at small consistent hints of cracks in the narrative, look at changes in perspective looped together by setting and soundtrack. Atonement is a master work of fiction and of film, but feminism is not something I believe it can claim.
Marcia Herring is a rollergirl receptionist from Southeast Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, but swears to have it done someday. She spends most of her time watching television and movies and wishes she could listen to music and read while doing so without going insane. She previously contributed an analysis of Degrassi, Teens, and Rape Apologism and a review of X-Men First Class.