Movies @ 19 Dec 2007 11:52 am by Christina Waters
I’m not going to be one of those reviewers who complains that the film isn’t as
good as the book. It’s worse. Atonement is a film that manages to expose the flaws of the book so glaringly (translation: the film moves from atmospheric, to cloying, to boring, to sentimental, to cliché, to boring) that it makes me wonder why I thought I liked the book so much to begin with.
Director Joe Wright doesn’t so much direct as arrange his handsome cast in upper-crust English great houses, soft-focus lawns and smokey battlefields as if they were so many runway models on a fashion shoot. Atonement is graced with some staggeringly original and effective cinematography, to be sure. And the languidly anorexic Keira Knightley is surely a fetching partner for the insanely attractive James McAvoy. Chiffon never looked so appetizing. Cigarettes have never been smoked with such wanton, wealth-stricken abandon. Never has so much gorgeous imagery been squandered on such an obvious exercise in ironic cleverness.
Visualize Gone With the Wind done by the BBC, plus a bit of The English Patient by way of Last Year at Marienbad. Now remove freshness, smartness and urgency. Now remove dramatic tension. That’s it.
Glossy perfume commercial cinematography can’t inject life — class yes, life no — into this uneven exercise in conceptual chick lit.
When Ian McEwan came to Stanford last year, I heard him talk about the inception of his book, as sort of an effort to do Virginia Woolf but where “something actually happens.” It was a good line, but it was only half right. His book – set in three “acts” of varying quality — owes a lot to Woolf’s masterpiece, To the Lighthouse. And yet – as far as the film version of Atonement is concerned — nothing happens. Nothing except a great deal of self-congratulations.
Atonement is not the greatest thing since sliced bread I don’t care what the Hollywood academistas are selling. It isn’t even a better version of an old idea. Room with a View was so much more of a complete film experience without all the media hype. Knightley surely has the sharpest shoulder blades and most articulated vertebrae in the business. But it isn’t enough. Not even in that smashing green dress.
Go see Across the Universe again.
I didn’t like the book that much and though I’m kind of a sucker for films set in grand English homes I’ll wait to rent this. “Room With a View” was wonderful. Ditto “The English Patient” and “Last Year at Marienbad.” There was a recent article in the NY Times about the house used in “Atonement.” A woman inherited it from her aunt. Can you imagine? There are 90 rooms in the place!