ATONEMENT(2007)Crew: Directed by Joe Wright • Screenplay by Christopher Hampton • Based on the novel by Ian McEwan • Produced

by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Paul Webster • Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey • Edited by Paul Tothill • Music Composed by Dario Marianelli • Production Design by Sarah Greenwood • Art Direction by Ian Bailie, Nick

Gottshalk, and Niall Moroney • Set Decoration by Katie Spencer • Costume Design by Jacqueline Durran • Makeup and Hair by Ivana Primorac • Internationally Co-Produced by Working Title Films (UK), Relativity Media (US), Studio

Canal (France) • Distributed in the United States by Focus Features • Rating: R • Running Time: 123 minutes

Cast: • Kiera Knightly (Cecilia Tallis) • James McAvoy (Robbie Turner) • Saoirse Ronan (Briony Tallis, age 13) • Romola Garai (Briony Tallis, age 18) • Vanessa Redgrave (Briony Tallis, age 77) •

Harriet Walter (Emily Tallis) • Patrick Kennedy (Leon Tallis) • Benedict Cumberbatch (Paul Marshall) • Juno Temple (Lola Quincy) • Brenda Blethyn (Grace Turner) • Daniel Mays (Tommy Nettle) •

Nonso Anozie (Frank Mace) •

“…the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking that they were unique, when no one was.”

Briony Tallis (From the novel Atonement)

The fluid prose and psychological realism of Ian McEwan’s 2002 critically-acclaimed novel Atonement serve as the foundation for its faithful adaptation to the screen by director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton. Both Wright and Hampton have had previous experience working with original source material and translating it to a filmic mode of expression. While Wright helmed an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005), Hampton’s florid language can be heard in his reconstructions of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Mary Reilly (1996), The Secret Agent (1996), and most recently The Quiet American (2002). Associating these creative agents with a degree of control over the development of these texts accounts for their contributions to Atonement; however, one can not dismiss the larger influences that industrial, socio-cultural, and reception practices have over the finished product and its relevance. McEwan himself tackles the weighty issue of authorship in the novel through his own commentary on the purpose and abilities of the literary author, simultaneously questioning and reaffirming an author’s godlike power in his self-reflexive metafictional universe. McEwan describes the infinite variation inherent in personal experience, with perspectives changing rapidly between situations and between individuals (see epigraph). The privileging of one viewpoint over others is what ultimately invites the kind of confusion and misunderstanding that drives the tragic events of the novel.

The sophisticated employment of multiple points of view in the novel is translated into a mode of visual storytelling in the film that exploits the nuances of perspective. The precarious transitional world of adolescence, in particular, is the site of distress in this case, not only for the character experiencing it but also for those around her who fall prey to her still childlike misapprehensions about social behavior. As Briony realizes the multiplicity of human experience, she comes into a naïve awareness of the complexly-textured landscape of moral ambiguity that characterizes life as an adult. The black and white world of her fairytale logic, where good and bad are easily identified, has become irrelevant, and Briony’s only recourse is to believe wholeheartedly in her nascent adulthood and the maturity she thinks it affords. Thus, she mistakenly considers herself an experienced student of human nature and its multitudinous shades of grey, erroneously seeing the potential for moral corruption everywhere as she attempts to decode the actions of her elders. The film presents the complicated nature of this conflicting perception through its episodic narrative, shifting points of view, and use of motif.

The film’s episodic narrative structure remains very faithful to the four major episodes that the novel divides itself into: the events at the Tallis Estate in England in the summer of 1935, Robbie’s time in Northern France during the evacuation to Dunkirk in 1940, Briony’s time as a nurse trainee during the war and her attempt at reconciliation, and the final epilogue. Both film and novel are segmented in a way that helps each major section maintain a fairly cohesive temporal continuity and spatial contiguity while also employing flashbacks and dream sequences that tie a connective thread between sequences.

The film’s intertitles are needed to explain the passage of time and the general location (“England 1935,” “Northern France Four Years Later,” “London Three Weeks Earlier”) as the causality of events follows a loose trajectory. This segmentation allows for the exploration of different points of view within each portion.

The novel operates through a fairly omniscient point of view as McEwan visits the interior psychological states of several of the characters when needed to augment the reader’s knowledge of the events transpiring. In the absence of such explanation, the film relies on shifting points of view to allow for the visual exposition of the characters’ interior states. The repetition of scenes from differing viewpoints is not a customary practice in filmmaking, as a linear, progressive narrative mode is usually favored in order to propel plotlines forward. The first segment of the film employs largely omniscient point of view as we are made privy to the actions of several of the characters at the Tallis Estate. It is with the introduction of multiple points of view on singular events that the film begins to play with perspective and explore the impact that misperception has on the characters of the story.

Two major events operate through repetition in the first segment to explain character interiority. The first time the audience witnesses this is when Briony peers from her bedroom window to see Cecilia and Robbie interacting by the fountain. Unable to hear them, Briony watches as Cecilia undresses and soundlessly dives into the fountain in her undergarments and exits the water dripping wet and practically nude in Robbie’s presence. Confused by this, Briony grabs her notebook and proceeds to go for a contemplative walk across the grounds. Just prior to her departure, however, the exact fountain scene she witnessed earlier is replayed from the perspective of Cecilia and Robbie. The audience is made aware that the vase Cecilia intended to fill with water broke when Robbie attempted to help and in frustration, Cecilia dives in after the broken piece in her underwear, despite Robbie’s presence. Briony is denied the kind of knowledge that the audience is made privy to and thus her perspective falls prey to adolescent supposition. We witness the same scene from two differing points of view, the repetition of which helps to explain Briony’s confusion and alerts the audience to the potential for conflict.

The second instance of multiple points of view is when Briony discovers Robbie pinning her sister Cecilia against the wall of the library in a “compromising” position that Briony later characterizes as assault. That same scene is reenacted from Cecilia and Robbie’s perspective, and we learn that the two have revealed their feelings for each other and have proceeded to consummate their love. This sequence especially highlights the conflictual nature of perception as Briony, affected by both her immaturity and willful claim to adulthood, develops a point of view filled with the severity of adult action and none of its nuance.

Generalized differences in perspective occur at separate times when both sisters have contrasting responses to the use of language in Robbie’s letter to Cecilia. Briony is cognizant of human sexuality yet lacks the maturity to understand its myriad forms of expression and action; four-letter “profanities” about female anatomy take on an unusual perversion for her that encourages the interpretation of further sexual acts as deviant. While Briony is appalled by the letter and considers Robbie to be a “sex maniac,” Cecilia is flattered and excited by Robbie’s expression of desire. We witness Briony’s horror over the use of adult language when the audience sees a close up of her face as she is reading the “offensive” word, a shot followed by an extreme close-up of the word itself being typed across a page, letter by letter, emphasizing the severity of the situation in her eyes. It is Briony’s fundamental misrecognition of these events that leads her later to falsely accuse Robbie of a crime, fully believing that her understanding of the situation is the only perspective possible. Here, point of view is directly linked to the causality of events within the plot.

The most prevalent motif operating throughout both the novel and the film is the return, an idea that manifests itself differently in the formal and thematic elements of the film. It can be found in the form of Cecilia’s urgent requests for Robbie to “come back” to her both mentally and physically, a simple utterance becomes a mantra for both Cecilia and Robbie in their quest for reunification. The film’s repetition of scenes to explain points of view returns the audience multiple times to a particular moment

to signify the importance of how these events were viewed by the characters. Wright goes so far as to include a montage sequence composed of individual shots for which the footage is played backwards, a seeming reversal of fate, as key moments in the plot are undone and therefore unable to inflict the damage that they do. In this montage the audience witnesses the restoration of the broken vase, the rescue of the letter from Briony’s possession, and the removal of each individual letter within the offensive word in a typed retreat off the page. The most literal incarnation of these reversals comes when the scene of Robbie’s arrest is played backwards so that he is physically returned to Cecilia’s presence, the two appearing to connect. Briony’s final act of restoring the couple to life after their tragic deaths returns them to a state of happiness, giving them back what “they had lost out on in life.” Finally, Briony’s vascular dementia is what propels her finally to write and finish the book that is essentially an exercise in returning to the past, the revisiting of memories both painful and pleasant, in a last attempt at atonement.

Both the novel and film met with considerable critical praise and garnered many award nominations. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Cinematography, Art Direction, and Supporting Actress. It won an Academy Award for Dario Marianelli’s original score. In 2008, the film also won the prestigious BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award for Best Film. The film’s commercial success has been a slow progression since its release in December of 2007, earning only $4.2 million initially. Its revenue has since grown to a domestic gross of over $50.9 million and a foreign gross of over $77 million. The film was awarded the USC Scripter Award for its adaptation from novel to film.

Film Notes by Kelly Wolf

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