Tone Deaf

[December 5th, 2007]

Ian McEwan’s devastating 2001 novel Atonement hinges on a misconception. The mistake is made in 1935 by 13-year-old aspiring writer Briony Tallis, a girl who wrecks several lives by claiming she’s seen a rape. This pivotal moment, however, is anticipated by a series of notions in little Briony’s head. The idea she thinks is most important has nothing to do with sex but everything to do with storytelling: She decides that the moralistic tales she’s been painstakingly writing in her room are not worthy of the great fiction she is destined to compose. Her latest work, she realizes, is no good. “It’s the wrong genre!” she wails to her sister before fleeing the room.

Now director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton have refashioned Atonement into Focus Features’ tent-pole Oscar movie of the holiday season, while remaining scrupulously faithful to the events of the book. The story still centers on young Briony (Saoirse Ronan) and how her accidental interruption of her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and her lover Robbie (James McAvoy) canoodling in the library leads to ruin. (The simultaneous release of this film and The Golden Compass means that this is the weekend for literary adaptations with the moral that little girls ain’t nothin’ but trouble.) But Hampton has left out Briony’s tantrum about her writing, and the omission feels like an act of leniency toward his director. Joe Wright has made a movie that is handsome, sweeping and not without emotional affect. There’s just one problem. It’s the wrong genre.

The category Wright has chosen is the period romance—overheated melodrama crossed with sweaty mystery. As Hampton’s screenplay follows the events of the novel—a formidable task, deftly handled—Wright speeds the events along with tracking shots that race through the corridors of the Tallis family’s estate. These room-to-room pans, combined with menacing piano clanks, give the movie an unfortunate resemblance to Clue . (It was Robbie! In the library! With a penis!) This impression is not improved by the casting of Briony. Ronan is a talented child actress, but with her intense, baleful stare and hair dyed blond, she appears less like a well-intentioned innocent and more like a horror movie Bad Seed. McAvoy is terrific as the earnest Robbie—he’s matured from a faun into a leading man seemingly overnight—but Knightley is another miscasting: Her Katharine Hepburn’s-little-sister hauteur is ill-suited for a character who is essentially passive in her own downfall.

It was New Yorker critic Anthony Lane who noticed that Wright’s debut movie, an ambitious take on Pride and Prejudice , felt less like Jane Austen than Charlotte Brontë—the irony was replaced with swooning. Atonement follows the same pattern, taking the incidents of McEwan’s book and staking them to rapturous images of a weeping woman straining for her beloved’s hand, or a man chasing hopelessly after a bus. It’s not an insult to say that both of Wright’s films feel like quality adaptations of Harlequin novels—or at least I don’t intend it as one. But it does suggest that he might have better success with pulpier sources.

The larger problem is that Wright’s agitated approach to the material—complete with banging typewriter keys on the soundtrack to remind us that this is a book , dammit—has a distancing effect on the audience. With Cecilia, Robbie and Briony viewed through the gauzy lens of prestige filmmaking, we can weep at their fates without the slightest risk of having to understand their perspectives. Which is fitting, really. One of McEwan’s themes in Atonement is the difficulty—the near impossibility—of understanding another person’s motivations, of getting inside somebody else’s head. And in attempting to translate the novel to the screen, Joe Wright has made a movie that never connects us to any of its characters. It’s a failure as a film, but its misconception is a strange validation of the book’s truth.