The always lovely Keira Knightley in Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s highly acclaimed novel

Atonement

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After taking on Jane Austen’s beloved (and already impeccably adapted) Pride and Prejudice, director Joe Wright is taking a stab at another acclaimed piece of British literature, Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Now, adapting any novel for the screen is difficult, but McEwan’s superb 2001 novel, a largely internal tale of misconception, misunderstanding and guilt, was probably particularly challenging, seeing as the author played with different characters’ perspectives to lead his reader to a particularly arresting climax. While Wright does succeed in some aspects, much of McEwan’s psychological subtlety has been traded for fancy camera shots and stylish montages.

McEwan’s basic plot is followed to the letter: on one fateful day in 1935, 13-year-old Briony Tallis spies her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) disrobing and diving into the fountain on their family’s English country estate while the maid’s son Robbie Turner (James McEvoy) watches. Briony mistakes this incident — as well as others, including a consensual sexual encounter between Cecilia and Robbie — as perversion and subsequently fingers Robbie for a crime that he did not commit. Five years later, Robbie is out of prison and, like the rest of England, off to war, with Cecilia still holding onto her love for him.

The story, without the benefit of McEwan’s internal observations, could easily be told in an hour or so, so Wright is left with some choices on how to fill out the time. While he does well with the occasional shift in perception, replaying scenes as observed by Briony’s fanciful imagination and how they would have occurred in reality, the movie may have been better off if he paid more attention to the fateful day in 1935 than Robbie and Cecilia’s time during the Second World War. The bond between the lovers isn’t given enough attention at the beginning of the film, making the possibility of their postwar reunion less exciting than it could be. A huge section of the film focuses on Robbie wandering around war-torn France, and while these sequences — like the rest of the film — are breathtakingly shot, they don’t add to the emotional core of the story.

In fact, the film as a whole suffers from a kind of showboatism on Wright’s part. Even in the early section on the estate, Atonement is so stylized that it could pass as one of Knightley’s Chanel ads. While beautiful cinematography is certainly not a bad thing, it doesn’t really matter how Cecilia looks in an evening gown when the director doesn’t take the time to convince his audience that she really loves Robbie and is willing to give up everything she holds dear for him.

It’s hard to say how Atonement will be received by anyone who hasn’t read the novel — but fans of the book who still can’t get its numbing ending out of their minds will be let down. Without McEwan’s literary tricks, it’s hard to care enough about these people to worry if they live or die, and without that, there’s no real punch to this story.