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.

The film then flashes forward several decades and we see Briony as an author near retirement (Vanessa Redgrave). Here she offers a confession to her interviewer that ties the film’s story together. When I encountered the revelation in the novel, I wanted to reread whole sections with this new interpretation. The confession leaves the audience wondering about the nature of sin, guilt, and atonement. In the hospital Briony learns that the audience has the final say of what really happens in any tale and that we want a certain type of ending often at the expense of truth.

Briony and the audience wonder given the realities of the story, what kind of atonement, of rectification, of reconciliation can she ever achieve? It is at this moment that we realize that nothing short of a God beyond physics could bring Briony the atonement for which she hopes. Her attempts fall short and do nothing but rewrite history rather than actually redeem it. To take a theological detour, this is part of the beauty I find in the Christian message. God does not wipe history clean and begin a new draft. Instead, God fills the good parts of history fuller than they were previously, and casts the bad in a new light. Nothing is lost and everything is put in its right place. Atonement sadly shows us our attempts at achieving forgiveness for ourselves will fail. Grace does not need to lie or hide the disgusting parts of our histories. Grace brings those parts into the light and then miraculously lets them go.

The film closely follows the structure of the novel, broken into three distinct parts, each taking place at different periods of the characters’ lives. I read Atonement in early 2007, not knowing that a film version was due for release the same year. (Oddly enough the same thing happened as I read Beowulf, also without knowledge of Robert Zemeckis’ film.) It is difficult to not compare the film to the novel. I cannot say how well the film works without knowledge of McEwan’s book. McEwan mines the interior lives of the characters so thoroughly that as a reader, I knew what the characters on the screen were thinking. I’m not sure how well this would be communicated to the uninitiated audience. But it works for me. The acting is first-rate, especially from Knightley and McAvoy. Wright has done an amazing thing and takes my least favorite section of the novel, the first section, and makes it my favorite segment of the film. For what it’s worth, he has also truncated the second section in ways that I didn’t appreciate, though one cannot praise enough the long single-take shot of Robbie walking along the beach at Dunkirk. Perhaps my favorite technique, however, is Briony’s hairstyle which does not change from when she is 13 to when she is on the verge of retirement. It works as a subtle cue that Briony has never been able to move beyond her guilt. Her sin arrests her development.