"Atonement": a movie review

Dec 27, 2007 23:38

On Christmas day we went to see "Atonement", based on Ian McEwan's novel by the same title. It's a World War II-era drama.

It may be that as a genre reader I've conditioned myself to expect plot twists and turns and things being Not What They Seem. So I feel a little baffled when I encounter a story as straightforward as this one, where everything is exactly as it seems. I almost wonder: do you really need a 2-hour movie to tell a story the plot of which can be summed up in 5 sentences? And how can it possibly fill a novel? But of course the point of any movie (or a novel) isn't to recount the events but to portray the human condition, and this movie does a nice bit of portraying. So for example instead of gunshots and explosions it shows soldiers chattering about some silly stuff while they travel along a war-stricken countryside; later they come to an amusement park, bizarrely set up amidst the ruins, and there's a Ferris wheel rising above the rubble, and it actually works, and the soldiers, however improbably, are managing to have fun. Despite not much happening, the movie does not drag on; those 2 hours go by rather quickly. Still, it left me with a sense of "and that's all there was"? Steve thought the actual twist came at the end, where it turns out that a protagonist's idea of "atonement" for a devastating lie was to tell a story with an artificially happy ending, as if that would somehow compensate for the lives she ruined with her lie. Steve saw it as a quintessential example of the darkness of human nature that Ian McEwan is so good at portraying. Just when you think you've seen people at their worst, McEwan shows you how they can get even worse. I personally thought the protagonist's self-deception was merely melodramatic and cheesy, as opposed to evil. But what do I know. Steve said he used to be a big fan of McEwan, devouring each of his books as soon as they came out. Hmm. I don't know if he still is, because to tell the truth, not only I haven't seen any books by this author lying around the house, this is the first time I've heard of him. ;-)

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