by Adam Shaftoe

Created on: February 10, 2009   Last Updated: February 27, 2009

A brief review of Joe Wright's Atonement:

If cinema is meant to allow for the effective fusion of nuanced narrative and artistic tableau, Atonement presents itself as nothing more than an over-hyped attempt to cajole Oscar nominations. Inspired by Ian McEwan's novel of the same name, the film's trailers give a prospective viewer hope that they might be treated to a thoughtful period piece. The unfortunate reality is that Atonement fails to live up to its literary legacy: Rather it is the kind of picture that mundane minds will sit in awe of while the rest of the world yawns with disinterested contempt.

The two hours of self-serious storytelling within storytelling centre on jarring time shifts and Hollywood's propensity to use old ladies as a catchall for story telling this passes as an original idea if you assume that nobody in the audience has ever heard of a movie called Titanic. In fact, the story, for its plodding pace, weak fixation of exploring class based biases and a dull genuflection to the horrors of war, managed to barely carry the complexity of a Saturday Night Live send up of a Jane Austen novel.

Un-reality presents itself as the foremost theme in Atonement. The director's attempt to paint pre-World War Two Great Britain as a place where class bias is so strong that a spoiled pre-pubescent patrician from the unremarkable English countryside could have James McAvoy condemned as a rapist/pedophile is clumsy, at best. Echoes of the Keystone Cops rang through this reviewers ears as the typewriter themed sound track pounded away with a dull staccado. Worse still, there is little-to-no honest emotion infused into the remaining cast of characters, including Miss Keira Knightley. Indeed, her character comes across a significantly watered down, but heavily over acted rendition of Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice fame.

Is Atonement trying to be the next English Patient? It certainly seems so. However, looking past the endless stream of "guv's" and derivative "war movie" fodder juxtaposed against the strategic debacle that was the British Expeditionary Force's evacuation at Dunkirk, Atonement seems like the kind of film that is desperate to prove that it is more than the sum of its parts. Any credulous viewer should be able to see beyond the banal suggestions that this film possesses radical cinematography, score, acting, editing or any of the other essential components of a film. Setting a film amid scenes of human suffering does not obscure the fact that the story is nothing more than the sub-par derivative hokum that we should come to expect from recent Tinseltown offerings.

Overall, Atonement is a dull period piece, conveniently set amidst one of the lesser known and least cinematically explored chapters of the Second World War. The back and forth over acting and under acting combine with a painful pace and not-so-surprising twist ending to produce a film that utterly fails to live up expectations.

Learn more about this author, Adam Shaftoe.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.