The Nature of Redemption: Atonement (Film) Review

Any piece of art with the title Atonement will undoubtedly address religious themes. Director Joe Wright’s generally faithful adaptation (working from a script by Christopher Hampton) of Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name asks the hard questions of what does atonement mean when we sin greatly and can we ever fully achieve it? On the sweltering day of a dinner party at the family estate, young Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) sees and grossly misinterprets an incident involving her sister and the son of her family’s cook at a fountain outside the house. Briony takes great pride in her imagination and fancies herself as an aspiring author. Her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and the cook’s son Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) are home from college for the summer. Robbie works as the gardener for the family and is considering entering medical school and had been the object of Briony’s crush. Cecilia and Robbie were close friends growing up, but a distance has grown between them at Cambridge, though it is not a distance either totally understands or wants. It is the distance of realizing one’s attraction to the other, but without the courage to act on that attraction. We see the scene at the fountain twice, once from Briony’s point of view and then from Cecilia and Robbie’s. We understand Cecilia and Robbie’s feigned antipathy as masking their love whereas Briony can only interpret the event from a physical and maturational distance as the actions of a brute seeking his sick domination of her sister. This event sets the course of the rest of the story. A mishap with the delivery of a letter Robbie writes to Cecilia and another misinterpretation of Cecilia and Robbie’s love seals Briony’s suspicions of Robbie as a sex maniac. That evening, when Briony briefly witnesses the rape of her cousin, she knows and names the culprit without hesitancy.

Briony’s testimony wrongfully sends Robbie to prison where he procures early release only if he goes to fight the Nazis in Europe. Cecilia severs her ties with her family after they back Briony’s accusations of Robbie. Years later she will go to work as a nurse in London. Briony, now 18 years old (and played by Romola Garai) also becomes a nurse in London, trying and failing in various ways to deal with the sin she committed that has determined the paths of three lives. Her self-prescribed purgatory in the hospital cannot assuage the guilt she feels. Meanwhile Robbie walks a long road of retreat to the French sea town of Dunkirk. He is injured and meets up with the rest of the British army as they await rescue by their navy to return to England. Months pass and Briony seeks out Cecilia who now lives with Robbie, nursing him back to health in more ways than one. In a scene filled with real anger and tension, Briony admits the truth of what happened that night years ago and agrees to do her best to rectify the destruction she wrought on the lives of her sister and former crush.