Rating: 1/2
by Derek Smith 1/21/07

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Joe Wright's 2005 debut, Pride & Prejudice, was a surprise to most people, myself included, for its beautifully fluid direction and ability to inject a bit of life and originality into a source material that had seemingly been tapped dry.  I went into Atonement, expecting the same type of directorial precision and for a good 40 minutes, I got it.  Wright's ability to weave the subjective experiences of the young Briony into a tense web of conflicting emotions while making wonderful use of the mansion and grounds had me thinking this might turn out to be one of the better chamber dramas in recent years.  As the young Briony (Saoirse Ronan) witnesses several sexually charged events, the significance of which are greatly warped by her young adolescent mind, the film carefully frames the objective against her subjective, successfully building towards the emotionally charged accusations against her older sister Cecilia's newfound flame - the gardener/family friend Robbie.  As he is driven away by the police for a crime he didn't commit and his and Cecilia's eyes meet, we too might as well be waving goodbye to the film that we'd seen up until that point.  It's all downhill from here.

The rest of the film rests entirely on Robbie and Cecilia's longing for one another, while Briony, who has come to realize the graveness of her error, becomes a nurse like her sister to atone for her sins.  Unfortunately, this combination of wartime pining and woe-is-me posturing was all too reminiscent to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's wretched A Very Long Engagement, another film which places a love story amidst the turmoil of war, only to prop up its hero's longing for his love above the depraved conditions surrounding him.  Had the film effectively evoked Robbie's suffering or given it a truly subjective feel, it's possible this could have worked, but most of this section consisted of him walking around brooding while we're expected to collectively wallow in his sorrow.  Even the technically brilliant and much-lauded tracking shot is used more as a representation of how far Robbie has fallen because of Briony's betrayal, rather than showing a genuine, humane interest in a broader context.  The other half of this section is a bit more successful thanks to Romola Garai's performance as the older Briony, but as we watch her trying to scrub her sins away, all that develops is limp, half-baked drama, which given the ending (which I won't spoil) is even more inexcusable.  In the end, Wright again showed me he knows how to create a beautiful visual palette, but here, the drama is stuck in purgatory after the solid first act, suffering from aggrandizing the feelings of love and regret without properly developing them first.