Ripping through a recent round of failed World War II epics, Atonement comes out strong, a tightly scripted and executed handful of scenes with the wit of Wilde and the authenticity of Austen. The shots move quickly moving back and forth between the present and the near present ushering meaningful dialogue complete with implicit exchanges as well. The story line follows Cecilia struggling to come to grips with her feelings for Robbie, played by James McAvoy who is less uncertain of his affections for the striking heiress portrayed by the very talented Keira Knightley. The story is complicated by the protrusion of the adolescent Briony, who although sharp is drawing erroneous conclusions of the two’s relationship- a simple enough mistake that comes to shape the future and development of these three characters.
Without going to deeply into the plot, this dynamic greatly alters the course of the story and we are thrust suddenly several years into the future where we find Robbie, now a foot soldier in the British Expeditionary Forces wandering through the French countryside with what is left of his platoon. The quick, charging pace of the film comes to a pronounced halt. The scenes run much less cohesively while Cecilia and Robbie reunite from where the film transitioned several years back.
Director Joe Wright allows the two to share the screen via a sudden shift into the not so distant past and that just long enough to let a genuine connection blossom before he rips them apart again. The film quickly moves into one of the greatest uncut scenes in recent history, a modern cinematic masterpiece, a five and half minute scene that runs uncut in euphoric visual mastery. The backdrop of this scene is one of the most dramatic moments in World War II- the evacuation of the English forces from Dunkirk; a story well known in English lore though lesser so in the American conscious.
The Luftwaffe had the Allied forces surrounded after the stunning success of the Blitzkrieg subsequent victory in the Battle of Dunkirk and expected to annihilate them completely. An eleventh hour rescue operation was hatched by the British that entailed the use of every vessel in British ports that could float. World Cup winning yachts, pleasure crafts, tugs, fishing scrawls, cruise ships, and the like were employed with their owners at the helm in a momentous effort of bravery and brawn as the men charted the open waters with the Royal Air Force giving cover, but through land mine infested waters with the German assaulting relentlessly. The British and French forces converged on Dunkirk beach awaiting evacuation sabotaging their equipment while thousands of injured were laid along the beach where nurses tended to the wounded as best they were able. The operation, dubbed Operation Dynamo was a success and will forever stand as a seminal turning point in the war and a trophy of the human spirit as over 330,000 troops were rescued.
Robbie’s experience transpires apart from any knowledge of these events. He stumbles onto the camp which resembles something Biblical in its proportion, falling about through the ruins surrounding the beach at Dunkirk. The scene is eclipsed multiple times with the harrowing, eerie remains of a Ferris wheel that rotates in the background, slowly complimenting the scene’s pace which could best be expressed as a stupor. The pure existentialism of the shots is stunning, engaging, haunting. The shelling that rattles in the distance, the smoke raising from various propositional sites of wreckage, the despair of the soldiers, all work to illuminate this long shot aimed at embodying the horrors of war. The film’s score escorts this scene through sometimes difficult transitions while maintaining a unified experience.
The story then moves into almost a third film all together with a documentary style interview with an elderly woman who we learn is the now aged young Briony who has written these events in a novel titled ‘Atonement.’ This transition is so abrupt, so defined that it leaves the viewer holding the pieces of the film they thought they were watching. However, Wright’s authentic shift accomplishes its purpose relying heavily on an interview structured dialogue that plays back and forth with film’s score and Briony’s raw emotions.
The major flaw in Atonement is Wright’s lack of ability to weave the scenes together to form a cohesive whole. Though each of the film’s three major parts could stand alone as masterful short films, their collective expression fails to deliver the film’s intentions and ultimately prohibits it from achieving the measure of stature of it aspires to. Yet, the film works on a variety of levels with artful execution to produce a twist on the epic war love story
