Guy-Jean De Fraumeni's Hollywood in the Hamptons

Atonement

This year's award season, over-generous helping of British literary adaptation from an intensely ambitious novel, obsessed with words, is not left unscarred by the equally powerful cinematic form. Although an impeccable drawing room drama, its proper stiff upper lip narrative is so dexterous that it reels out expressive spills of heartbreaking romance, lavish eroticism and historical perspective as it checkerboards from the luxurious 1935 country estate of a wealthy English family through the World War II battlefields of Dunkirk and ultimately through to the end of the twentieth century. The finality of its long distance time frame is compounded by an astounding surprise twist that will haunt for ages. If the art of writing can generate an obsession with words, it's easy to allow for the imaginative lengths a filmmaker like Joe Wright can go to. His previous brilliantly sterling Pride & Prejudice indicates the creamy/creative camerawork and intense attention to sublime detail with which he paints an enthralling canvas of the overly rich and summer-heated incubation of passion within the estate.

Sudden summer heat unstarched the crisp white dinner jackets and staccato tamping of cigarettes against their well-polished silver cases, setting into motion the four-part narrative of a fierce love ripped asunder by inadvertent steps and crucial misunderstandings fueled by the anxiety and hot clumsiness of a preteen, eerily odd budding writer, Briony, played magnificently by Saoirse Ronan. She mistakenly witnesses the awkward sexual dalliance of her older sister, Cecilia, portrayed by Pride & Prejudice star Keira Knightly and Robbie Turner, the son of the family's housekeeper. As played by James McAvoy, Robbie's churning sex drive blunders as honestly as a misdirected blunderbuss. Misstep follows misstep. Cecilia splashes into a fountain to save a family jewel Robbie has thrown away carelessly. Her slight body became glaringly clear in the water as the fabric melded to her flesh. Her anger is uncontrolled, as is his boyish sexuality now pounding itself out on the typewriter. Childish Anglo-Saxon clunk-clunk clunks rattle out loudly and the camera moves in on the four letter word which was never meant to be seen by Cecilia but, as the fates would have it, a hastily written note to replace it finds its way to disaster. Poor little put upon Briony. She barely knew what the word meant.

Catastrophe piles upon calamity as the nervous clacking of the old typewriter slams the lovers together, literally and in sync with Dario Marianelli's music, turning the family library into a sex crime scene to Briony. She's convinced young Robbie is a monster. After all, she has a schoolgirl crush on him. Twist, twist, she will go on to accuse him of raping her fifteen-year-old cousin, Lola. Robbie will be disgraced and imprisoned and much worse, the star-crossed lovers are forcibly separated. The movie Gods have smiled upon them. Few film disasters can guarantee movie immortality as readily as being torn from each other.

Atonement's audaciously sumptuous first part girds the director for its second act. Can he top it? He floods the screen with a five minute plus steadicam shot across France's Dunkirk Beach. The sprawling scenes of destruction track the defeated soldiers waiting to be rescued from the German onslaught, including thousands of extras, horses and enough debris of the dead, the heroic , the depraved and the senselessness, for two movies. It's a showstopper. It divides the book's narrative. With little time left, the story stretches for seriousness and unfortunately becomes predictable. (Except, of course, for the switch ending). The middle acts reunite Cecilia and Robbie, who enlists in the army for an early release from prison. Briony is now eighteen and a nurse and played by Ronola Garai. Her work is gruesome. She's atoning for the wrongs to Robbie and Cecilia. The final act stretches the most for audacity. Briony is now a successful novelist in her seventies and Vanessa Redgrave tackles the balancing act between fantasy and reality.

My heart goes out to director Wright and his screenwriter Christopher Hampton for being saddled by Ian McEwan's most elegant novel. Its very, very fine style and quality can intimidate even the most talented of auteurs. The transference of literature to film is difficult, at best. When the written word is so grandly expressed as is Mr. McEwans, one wonders why anyone else should mess with it and beyond that, when the tenor of the crucial meanings is so tenuous, the delicate balance can be tilted to disaster. Which is why I worry about the fundamental premise of Atonement. Guilt and its torment of Briony over the years deep sixes the second half of Atonement. Like the grand old Titanic with its bow deep underwater and propellers spinning uselessly in the air, the concluding scenes of Atonement go by without much ado. As the characters age, they just get older. We see rust on the propeller shafts.

It is no coincidence that the other star-crossed lovers movie is Titanic. Just as the big old luxury liner vowed to be unsinkable, no one expected it to keep its promise. Half the fun of aching painfully for a lost love is aching even more so for it to resurface.

Guy-Jean De Fraumeni is the producer/writer/director of award winning European and American feature films. He has been a judge at major film and TV award competitions, including the Oscars, the Emmy's and various film festivals. Sarah Halsey assists him.

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