Atonement(2007)- User Reviews

(for the most part) expertly written and directed, really strong performances, especially from mc evoy. the problem, such that it is, with this film, is that it while it is beautifully shot, those exteriors mask some really,really nasty stuff going on underneath the surface. not simply in the interior deliberations of what the characters experience, but more importantly, in terms of the characters' conduct, that is what they actually say, and ultimately, wind up doing to each other.

ostensibly, this movie is about many things, love and death, the horrors of war, an historical context and a broad sense of human suffering, coming of age and loss of innocence, ok i get that. in addition, there are little things and big things, little people and big people in the world, little people in the sense that some relationships are more immediate and important, and bigger people, some relationships more important than others. dialectically, the movie universlizes any number of these themes through an unrelenting dialectical and oscillative process, by jumping back and forth between times, between places, between people and events, and juxtaposing the opposites to explore the messy middle ground in between. fascinating, really, i'm not sure i've ever seen it done in movies in quite this way, and the process, the pace of the film eventually becomes relentless. at the end, wright tacks on yet another level of interpretation which forces the viewer to place historical events in context, resulting in an enormous emotional pressure to reconcile the enormity of the events in a necessarily limited context--that is, to understand all that "historically" happened and relate that experience to a series of emotional judgments, of not emotional constructs.

problem is, in atonement, that the process isnt really about atonement at all. its really about emotional brutality, not about the WHY we do the filthy shyt we as human beings do, but the HOW. iow i'm not sure that what hampton and mc ewen put the characters through is "worth it," that the agony, suffering, and brutality is anything more than just that, pain for the sake of exposing the nature of the pain in itself, rather than part of a developmental exercise to educate, inform, and, maybe in some way, appropriately appeal to emotional reach of the interested viewer. maybe the pointlessness is part of the point wright is trying to make, maybe not. but while lacking, and appropriately so, a necessarily autotelic payoff, i still think the huge void at the end of the film suggested some basic and fundamental problems, maybe with the form and structure of the enterprise as a whole. Where you expect integration in the end, you experience alienation and separation, which in some way, may reflect a fundamental cynicsm, rather than an honest attempt on behalf of the filmmakers to resolve a series of troubling conflicts. to their credit, the producers and mc ewen all talk about this--and i think the last shot in the movie is clear evidence of the struggle to definitively resolve, not necessarily at any particular, but at an appropriate level, the problems that they themselves indicated they tried so hard to address. nonetheless, in many places, an asbolutely riveting emotional exercise, an intriguing blend of any number of filmistic elements, and overall, a powerful and emotionally provocative film experience.