Atonement
I’ve got to put the book on my wish list; I could swear a friend of mine gave it to me as a gift, and I just hadn’t gotten around to reading it, but I’ve gone through my shelves and stacks twice and no joy. Just as well that I hadn’t read it first, though, because I get the sense I’d have found the ending even more disappointing than I did.
My issue with the ending, and with the movie as a whole, is summed up quite well here. While I don’t like movies to decide what I should think for me, a stronger position is called for here, and the casting of Vanessa Redgrave, who by this point in her career provides a baseline of moral authority just by appearing onscreen, makes the story’s point of view on Old Briony’s actions hard to figure out. I’m told that, in the book, the reader is much more clearly meant to see that this last “generous” act of Briony’s, this benediction, is a gift to herself, not to the lovers, but the movie’s rendition of it is confusing; it’s our instinct to forgive her, because it’s Vanessa Redgrave doing the asking. The fundamentally self-serving nature of it doesn’t come through as well.
It’s an even bigger problem because the film has a narrative…I don’t know how to put it, exactly, but something didn’t seem to…match up, in the narrative thrust. Briony’s initial act is a petty one, but it has the heaviest of consequences (in Trekverse terms, she’s violating the prime directive, just for starters), but the tone in the first half of the film is kind of “ooh, scandal”-y; it’s a bit too light. And then the narrative skips ahead a few years, and tacks back and forth between the real and the imagined, and until the nightmarish sequence on the beach, it seems like maybe the movie doesn’t…get it, that this isn’t just parlor gossip. What went on in jail, what became of Lola in the intervening years — you know, Robbie did time for Briony’s lie. Lola was raped, and then married the attacker. If the audience is meant to meditate on the fact that Briony doesn’t really understand the reach of the consequences, okay, but enough attention is paid to setting Keira Knightley off with dry-ice fog that I started to wonder if I’d missed something, if the intended response is “beautiful and doomed, next!” and nothing more.
It’s beautifully shot; that beach sequence made me very uncomfortable, the filtering of the light to look migraine-y and Robbie’s desperation to find a drink — trickiness of the tracking shot aside, that feeling of claustrophobia and foreboding is expertly done. I liked Knightley in it as well; I always like her more than I think I will. The film has breathtaking moments, but taken as a whole, it’s just off somehow, and it’s all the more frustrating because it has so many affecting bits — a little fine-tuning, ten minutes tweaked out of the first half and a closer watch kept on the wryness in some scenes, flip the casting of Redgrave and Brenda Blethyn, and it comes together.
Tags: movies
Atonement the book is on my list of favorite experiences (for a variety of reasons), but Atonement the movie didn’t quite add up. To my mind, your instinct here is exactly correct. The movie almost captures the beauty of the book, but is just off the mark.
That’s really interesting, reading both your interpretation and Matt’s. Because I didn’t think the movie was any more sympathetic to Briony than the book was. I saw the movie first, and I absolutely took away the idea that she was selfish, self-indulgent, and trying to let herself off the hook for something she was too cowardly to address in life. I saw her effort as quite pathetic, and not noble at all. I mean, I understood that she believed she was being noble, but I never saw the movie as suggesting that she had done some kind of actually generous thing. Maybe I don’t like Vanessa Redgrave?
I actually preferred the movie to the book in a few ways, primarily because the movie is more ambiguous about how much is truth and how much is fiction in what you have just seen. The book is more explicit in saying, “She made up this part, but she got the rest of it from this collection of documentary evidence.” I really enjoyed both the book and the movie, but this reaction, that the movie is sentimentalizing Briony or underplaying her fundamental selfishness and amorality, is one I didn’t have at all.
“I understood that she believed she was being noble, but I never saw the movie as suggesting that she had done some kind of actually generous thing.”
I’m not sure the movie suggested that either; I did feel like we were supposed to respect the effort, or to understand that *she* understood that the small generosity she offered in no way made up for the damage she’d done. Part of that may stem from the sequence with the burn victims in the hospital, where it felt like we were supposed to see her seeing them, and attending to them, and feel like the message was getting through. In any case, I think *we’re* supposed to know it doesn’t make up for anything; the confusion comes from whether we’re supposed to know *she* knows that. My feeling was that we were supposed to think Briony “got it,” and it’s hard to think that’s the intent, but that’s what came across, to me. I mean, she still has her same hairstyle; surely we’re not supposed to think she’s progressed any, emotionally. And yet…
The movie may satisfy the conditions for Briony’s condemnation; I just wasn’t getting that from it. The construction of the story as a whole wasn’t hit on the sweet spot consistently enough for me, and the ending was of a piece with that.
My copy of the book is in the Housing Works bag; I’ll bring it tomorrow.
I got (mostly from Redgrave’s performance) that Briony regretted that she wasn’t a better person, and that she tried to view her lack of emotional growth and obsession with her lie as true repentance, and her fictional happy ending for the lovers as some kind of, well, atonement. The movie does do the job of showing how she never got beyond that time in her life–her constant rewriting of the story, her talking about Robbie being her “one crush” that had saved her from drowning, and her nonchanging hairstyle. I thought they were trying to project that she did “get it” in the sense that she finally understood that she wasn’t a good person: a lifetime of obsessing on a crime doesn’t change the fact that she never did anything about it. But I also felt the filmmakers were trying to get ME to forgive her, since she couldn’t forgive herself, and that’s where I had to get off the train. Nope, just because you’re losing your memory of what you did doesn’t mean you didn’t do it.
I have only seen the movie so far, and I didn’t think that Briony “got it” in the end. In fact, at the end of the movie I was so angry with her, that she was still so arrogant and thought she could ‘give them their happiness’ in her story and somehow make up for the multiple ruined lives.
I didn’t like Atonement the book (and therefore don’t plan to see the movie). My issue was the ending. I just didn’t like that the author took me on this long journey only to say, “But it didn’t really happen that way–everyone really ended up miserable. The end.” It seemed very gimmicky–like it was trying to hard for a “twist” ending.
I completely agree with you *Chyna*. When I finished the book, I thought to myself, “well there’s 9 hours of my life I won’t get back.”
Not that it isn’t well written, but the twisty ending just seemed cheap to me- almost like it was added at the 11th hour.
I’m different in that where a lot of people hated the book for the ending (Cij and Chyna!), I liked the book for the ending. What did bother me a little about the ending is that in the novel, she has dementia and it is implied that she’s admitting only to herself and the reader is privately privy to that — so, in the end, no one will know when it’s published (her publishers plan to wait until the Marshalls have passed away). So, it’s like she’s absolved herself completely and changed the truth with fiction. In the movie, she’s announcing it, which I think fundamentally changes the point of McEwan’s novel. He did sign off the script, though, so what the hell.
I’m admittedly a Knightley fan, and really liked her in the movie, but her role is actually much less in the novel, which I think is evidenced by the fact that Joe Wright originally wanted her to play “war years” Briony. Sars, a lot of the info about the middle years there sort of falls by the way side in the book, as well; other than the ending, I felt like it was an incredibly faithful adaptation, particularly for the narration. (Damn. I got a little long winded.)
You know, I love and admire the book, in part because of its unwillingness to let Briony off the hook and its portrait of cognitive dissonance from the inside. And I will probably never read it again, for the same reasons. It’s uncomfortable.
Briony was young and she didn’t know what she was doing, yes, but she ruined lives and that doesn’t get undone. I think we all generally try to tell ourselves the story of our lives in a way that makes us the protagonists, which means trying to view what we do in such a way that the bad stuff isn’t so bad (because, after all, we are good people!), and to concoct backstories that make our actions right and reasonable and understandable, even if those actions really aren’t. I thought McEwan did a deadly brilliant job of dissecting the way people do that, and of making the reader understand how that effort ultimately must fail, through watching his narrator fail to ever quite fully understand it.
I can’t see the movie; I know how it ends, and I don’t want to see it. Also, it’s such wonderful prose, and I don’t generally enjoy Keira Knightley or McAvoy enough to let them replace my own mental pictures.
@Cij & Chyna — so glad there are others out there who didn’t like the book, either. I would see the movie to find out if it redeemed the parts of the book I didn’t like … but probably won’t. You know how it is.
My main gripe was feeling like McEwan crafted the ending as an “exercise.” Like, he had the idea for a good story and then decided to get all writerly (which I usually love) and twist up the ending instead of just putting in a period. A little too self-indulgent, I think.
I haven’t seen the movie yet because of the book. I know I will someday but I’m not… ready?
I only loved bits of the book, the prose, some plot points, some of the nuances of the characters. The ending bothered me exactly because it promotes that self-serving smugness of Briony’s generosity, not necessarily because of the twist.
I didn’t like that the book was broken up, as I’ve heard the movie is, so it’s like two separate stories. And, given the whole journey, you do kind of finish and go … why? Overall, the story arc is kind of simple, and it’s interesting to see that the movie also either goes for simple (“beautiful and doomed, next!”) (and therefore more self-indulgent, because we’re supposed to see the brilliance and tragedy) or confusing.
I was pretty disappointed by Atonement, to the point I won’t read anything else by him. Should I reconsider? Should I make a point of seeing the movie for comparison?
I suggest not reading it if you don’t even have the plot twists to look forward to, though.
For myself, I was sitting in a theatre with my mother busting to go to the bathroom and thinking there was at least another hour of the film. And then twenty minutes later the final credits had rolled. The ending felt rushed and tacked on and I was even more disappointed to discover that the book is the same. Whilst I still enjoy the idea of Briony’s real atonement being more about what she’s written than any real solid act she made, it just wasn’t well done. And if Redgrave hadn’t had the scene where she ‘needs a moment’ to compose herself by throwing water on her face, it would have been at least five minutes shorter again. It struck me as lazy filmmaking, when up until that point I loved it entirely.
@Style Bard:
Yes, you absolutely should reconsider not reading any more McEwan, because Saturday is genius and, to my mind, superior to Atonement. I would say it’s the best book I read last year.
I haven’t seen the Atonement movie, partly because Knightley scares me and partly because it was only in my town for ten seconds, but I enjoyed the book purely for McEwan’s gorgeous prose. Saturday has that in spades, plus a far more compelling and resonant plot and characters.
Seriously. Read Saturday. It’s amazing.
I’m actually reading this as we speak–well, re-reading it. I read it because I saw a thousand posters for it when I was in London back in 1999 (it was re-released here in 2001), and honestly, I think I was too young to really get it. i just didn’t like it, and thought his prose was too flowery. Then I saw previews for the movie, and it looked so good (i LOVE James McAvoy, I think he’s so sexy) I saw it. And I had honestly forgotten most of the book (go figure!) that the ending it was a surprise to me. And I just loved the movie. I’m not overly critical of movies, but I thought Wright did a beautiful job with the material (and I love his version of Pride and Prejudice) and it was a very faithful adaptation. My problems with the movie were the same as with the book…there’s a huge jump between Robbie being taken away and him showing up in wartime 3 years later, and I think the book spent too much time on him at war (about 1/3) and not enough time with Briony and Cee as nurses. And seriously…you can’t explain to me a smidgen of what Briony was thinking those 3 years Robbie was in jail? What Cee did during that time? Nothing? That didn’t work for me.
In general, I’m enjoying it much more the second time around (especially after seeing the movie), and then I plan on watching the movie AGAIN, just to cap off the experience. There is irony in the fact that i’ve seen and watched a movie/book that I didn’t particularly enjoy the first time around more than most other movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read! And Molly, I’m adding Saturday to my Good Reads list, based solely on your glowing comments!
@ Molly and Style Bard: I was totally going to say the opposite – I read Amsterdam after that, and to me it had the same sort of whiplash ending that Atonement had. Though I have to admit that I will always love a good war scene, and McEwan’s description of Dunkirk was pretty awesome. I read the book pretty soon after it came out in the UK, during an onslaught of heavy fiction (read it, Bel Canto, The Fingersmith…other stuff) and felt a bit cheated, and definitely didn’t get that a) McEwan was criticizing Briony in the end there or that b) Briony “got it.” At all. So that my understanding of the movie ending and the book ending are one and the same – Briony thought she was doing a nice thing for Cecilia and Robbie by writing that ending. But then again, it took me years to get through the first half of the book, so that it’s all kind of blurry for me.
If you at all enjoyed the writing of Atonement, I’d recommend Spies by Michael Frayn, which in my mind gets everything right. Though I don’t really know what everything is at this point, because it’s so long ago since I read it, but yeah. Good stuff.
ps: I liked the movie because I love me some McAvoy, I don’t care how tiny he is.
Wing and Alli both very nicely brought their copies of Atonement in to work today for me to borrow. I didn’t need both copies, but when I tried to give one back, neither Wing nor Alli would accept theirs. Then I tried to give one to Joe because he can’t find his, and he’s like, “No no no no, it’s fine, I’ll just look again.”
Pretty funny in light of some of the comments here. “Here, take it.” “YOU take it.” “YOU’RE an atonement!”
Am I the only person on Earth who hated Atonement? It’s not that I didn’t get it; I got it. And I thought it was gimmicky and precious.
So ronrey.
To me, the movie didn’t work because it was Briony’s movie, and any time spent with the couple lacked any real drive. I didn’t know these people, and the movie seemed to think I cared a lot more about them than I did. The movie should be (and is) about Briony coming to understand and accept what she did. So any time spent away from that felt untrue to me anyway. So when the ending came along, I thought, “Well, there’s the reason that didn’t resonate with me, but the movie seems to think I should really care these people are dead.” And I didn’t. I’m a Keira lover and I didn’t care. But I’m also, strangely, a huge Romola Garai fan, so I was always impatient to return to her. It’s her movie! Who gives a crap about these pretty people.
This movie was worse than Titanic, in my opinion. At least Titanic didn’t pretend like it was clever, meaningful, or essential. People in the theater (myself included) were laughing during Atonement.
I felt no sympathy for Briony. I wasn’t really compelled by Robbie and Cecilia’s relationship because I was never let in on why they liked each other in the first place. She ignored him the whole time they were in college together because she was being a snob, so, he fell in love with her? Huh? The scene on the beach would have been good, but I didn’t understand why the war had anything to do with what happened in the first part of the movie, other than timing, and being a great way to kill off the tragic young lovers. I was quite disappointed that Vanessa Redgrave was even in this, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after last year’s egregious Evening.
I’m not sure how so many people can be so harsh a critic of the film or the book.
I saw Atonement as something very different than most of you did. I’m kind of a screwup in my still young age and am quite regrettably arrogant at times so I can relate to the writer.
It seems that a 13 year old girl was confused and made a small mistake with very painful consequences. I hear people talking about how arrogant this young girl, all old and worn, must have been to think that she could give them their happiness. To that I’d quote “He who is without sin cast the first stone.” I’d say it is awful arrogant OF YOU to sit in judgment of a woman who lived her whole life with regret and sorrow for the pain she caused as a 13 year old girl. She was fully aware that there was not a thing she could do to take back the hurt she had caused. She at the end of her life could still think of nothing but a last grasp at repentance knowing that she could not obtain forgiveness from her sister or the man her sister loved.
She knew very well that a happy ending to a book didn’t make it so in real life but what more could she have done? At the end of your life and you look back at the stupid mistakes you made, I wonder if you will still be trying your best to make a happy ending for the people you have mistreated.
There was one other thing I saw that most of you didn’t mention. That is the amazing ability we have to forget what real life should mean and what strong feelings come from real suffering. Real life should be full of struggle and grasping for repentance. Real life should be about love. The soldiers who served in and survived WWII have now come to the end of their lives and most of them never even talked about the struggles they endured. The soldiers endured so much, they all hopelessly struggled to return home.
The two people in this story are a just a snapshot of the thousands of other stories, most of which were never heard, of men and women that never reunited in this life.
I am thankful for this woman and the story she told because it reminds me of tens of thousands of stories that are forgotten.
I believe in an after life and I believe that there is a happy ending to this story. I am happy that she was willing to publish this last terrible beautiful story for the sake of the coming generations.
“I’d say it is awful arrogant OF YOU to sit in judgment of a woman who lived her whole life with regret and sorrow for the pain she caused as a 13 year old girl. She was fully aware that there was not a thing she could do to take back the hurt she had caused.”
I still haven’t read the book, but the movie I saw showed us neither a lifetime of regret and sorrow nor any awareness that telling *this* story would not absolve her of her sin. She thinks giving them a happy ending puts them even; it doesn’t, in my opinion, which, by the way, I’m entitled to hold on a work of fiction (and your tone implies its status may have escaped you — these aren’t real people we’re critiquing, they’re characters, and I’m pretty sure we’re *meant* to judge Briony harshly for *her* arrogance in the second place).
It wasn’t for the sake of the coming generations. It was to get forgiveness and adulation for herself — as selfless as a pedicure, in other words, and about as likely to make up for what she’d done all those years later. And my stupid mistakes do not include having someone jailed under false pretenses, nor contributing indirectly to their deaths as a result, so perhaps, since it is what I do for a living, I may be allowed to sit in judgment of A MOVIE.