Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62 in Movie
• Released on: 2008-06-18
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Running time: 124 minutes

Customer Reviews

Love, sex and class
Anyone familiar with Ian Mc+Ewan's prolific work knows that he is a writer that explores human sexulaity and it's consequences to the people and world around us. This film is meant to capture the story of a young girl who due to unusual set of circumstances is a witness to the startling attraction between her beautiful sister and her own platonic love, housekeeper's son Robbie. She is much younger that her sister and a young lad and confused and startled about their behavior while they are together. Her sister on the other hand, is beautiful and well aware of her high social standing. The yound man Robbie, she is attracted to, is housekeeper's son and in spite of his obvious handsome apperance and smartness (he is a scholarship kid attending medical school at Ivies) far from a catch for a girl of her social standing. But their mutual sexual attraction and electrofying desire will diminish all social constraints. It is the young girl who stands in the way of their happiness and her accusation against the young man inexplicable even to herself, is a cause of their demise and her eternal sorrow for her actions. I really enjoyed James McAwoy's performance and Vanessa Redgrave's appearance at the end of the movie is a real treat. I do not believe that any film can ever be as powerful as Ian McEwan's written word on paper. While Kira Knitley is beautiful to look at, her performace is just not quite there yet...

The Conclusion Makes It Worthwhile
I'm not eager to revisit the commentary that dozens of amazon reviewers have already discussed regarding "Atonement". I merely would like to bring up something I found striking, which doesn't seem to have been mentioned here - and that is, that if an adolescent girl finds it challenging to distinguish between a lover and a predator; well, DUH! I'm a retired person in late middle-age, and I'm STILL confused on that issue; LOL! I don't mean to suggest that her false testimony was warranted, but for Pete's sake how could that Robbie character be so careless with a typewriter, AND misdeliver said abomination to boot?! Am I the only person who found this extremely alarming? It's the primary reason that the "love" story didn't ring true for me, and I would have thought that Keira Knightley's character would have been turned off as well...

Nevertheless, I "liked" the movie, but not for the usual reasons (like the hype one reads on the DVD cover). "Atonement" was for me neither "epic" nor "romantic". But I enjoyed the pace of it, and the three people who portrayed Briony at different ages were terrific. Vanessa Redgrave's performance at the end made everything come together for me, and ratcheted up the quality of the entire film a couple of notches in just that moment (though I don't buy her "vascular dementia" story; she was far too cognizant to be the recipient of such a diagnosis at that point). But there is much food for thought in her explanation (as a writer) for her "final" book. For me it suggested that life and fate would have intervened to separate the lovers even if the young Briony had NOT committed her betrayal. Stuff happens, and fairy tale endings are what FICTION is made of...

French without Tears
In ATONEMENT just misses being a masterpiece, but some of this has to be attributed to the moviemaker's obsessive fidelity to the source text--for once, they should have thrown out the book and just kept the cinematic elements. Here the actors work overtime to embody the ultra-romantic lovers Ian McEwan created in his novel, but the one is so painfully thin, and the other so oddly short, that actually I didn't even think the army would take him, even if they were so desperate they were recruiting convicts during the dark days preceding Dunkirk.

Knightley and McAvoy are otherwise perfectly convincing and oh, how I wanted them to have a happy life together! Compounding what you might call "identification" problems in the movie is the way the director has used three different actresses to play the part of Briony Tallis. The young girl is very good, but it's the grown up girl who's the best, Romola Garai, here outshining everything else she's done on the screen. None other than Vanessa Redgrave plays Briony as an elderly woman, now a world famous novelist on the order of Iris Murdoch--Redgrave is a good ten years too young to play her convincingly, as the real life character would be really, really, really old, while Redgrave looks ready to play Renee Richards all over again. She sort of called in the part, oddly enough, and maybe a relief after the anguish all the other actors have to express. It is Redgrave who has to put over the big post modern twist in the story, and whether or not that falls flat depends on how much you believe her slightly wry delivery. Her explanation for her character's actions may leave you walking away thinking, did she really expect us to believe her?

We were in a crowded theater when James McAvoy is typing the incriminating letter that gets him into so much trouble, one letter at a time, type, type, type, each character filling the screen, and a little boy in the audience asks his mother, what does that word spell Mama? Everyone laughed and I didn't hear what the mother told her son. It was just awful, why take your toddlers to a movie called "Atonement"? Or maybe you should take them out when the lovers onscreen start typing out four letter words in the late nineteen thirties.