Atonement: A British Cold Mountain without good music and much less interesting

* * * (out of 5)

I never met my grandmother on my mother's side. She lived in Ireland, but one story I heard about her always made me smile. She didn't go to movies often, but when she did there had better be a lot of action, otherwise she would squirm in her seat and say not too quietly, "let's move it along." Or "is anything ever going to actually happen?" She would have been squirming in Atonement

Actually, Atonement would make a really good episode of Masterpiece Theatre. Told in an hour, it would be riveting viewing. But Joe Wright (director of the much superior Pride and Prejudice) is forced to take this one hour of material and stretch it across 2+ hours. As you can imagine there is a lot of time for you to look at your cellphone's clock.

I enjoy Rashomon-style story telling, where you see what one character sees and then you see what actually happens, but the alternative versions of the stories in this film are not too far from what the viewer saw. And the stories themselves are none too riveting. There are several moments in this film which are made to be much bigger than they are. A little girl looks out a window and sees her older sister take off her dress in front of the gardener whom she likes and jumps in the fountain in just her slip. The girl comes out wet and see through. The little girl looks as confused as we are. What did she just see? It turns out the older girl was retrieving a broken piece of china that the gardener broke by accident. Wow, it's like two completely different stories. Can you show me that again? LOL

And when director Wright really wants to throw you a monkey wrench he blurs the camera so that the scene plays out much more mysteriously than it should. Oh my God, is that a ring on the floor in the distance? What does that mean? It means someone dropped it. Little more. I feel bad for Wright, because he has so little material to work with, but he read the script and he took the job. If you don't have the ingredients to make a cake, then don't bother trying.

Starting off in 1935, this British trifle shows manor life in a country estate with a 12 year old girl named Briony and her active imagination. She has a crush on Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the family's gardener, but he has his sites set on her older sister Cecelia (Keira Knightley). This makes Briony mad and watches them with an angry puss. If they ever remade the Bad Seed, this little girl would play her perfectly. The movie jumps forward to 1939 and World War II in France. Robbie and two Army pals are stuck there and after getting the word of a British retreat, try to head back toward England. This part of the movie consists of a lot of long walks with not a German soldier in sight. What are they retreating from? Sunsets and good cheese?

There is one tracking scene which was technically pretty cool. I'm not sure how long it lasts, but probably close to 5 minutes, with one camera uninterrupted as it pans out on a beach filled with hundreds of British soldiers and follows Robbie as he works his way through this crowd of humanity. Wilson manages to show in one take how cruel and decadent the British Army was before its leadership tightened the reins. For some ungodly reason soldiers were shooting healthy looking horses on the beach in France. I gave it three stars mostly for the acting and the cinematography. When I saw the trailer for Atonement months ago, I was afraid that I saw the whole movie and except for the end, I pretty much did. Note to self: Stop watching trailers, they spoil too many movies.


The Freditor