Atonement

Posted by Canfield at 8:26am.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews .

This is a movie tailor made for those who feel guilty about watching movies like Atonement. Confused? I’m guessing writer director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice 2005) was too. After all he adapted a well known novel to the point of being unrecognizable and then made exactly the sort of film that would render the novels central premise as inert as possible. The end result a movie that is pretty to look at because it is mainly interested in being pretty to look at. Everything else about it seems subtly insincere and peripheral except the performances which are doomed because they are written to play on our emotions in exactly the fashion of a Harlequin romance. Having thus far made a career out of making such films one can only appreciate the irony of Wright’s inability to win any of the Academy Awards he’s so good at reaching/getting nominated for. Oh well, what is grumpy old reviewer to do? I admit it’s harder to forgive mon director when his basic premise had so much promise. A young girl catchers her sister in the arms of a childhood friend and is driven by childish jealousy to tell a lie that wreaks havoc she could not have imagined. This is the stuff of legendary insight put to the shallowest of aestethic ends. The DVD contains the sort of extras you’d imagine including deleted scenes, a making of and directors commentary.

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Reader Comments

The Visitor 03/20/2008 @ 9:34am

i wouldn’t call it shallow. i was moved by the ending, and i cared about the characters. and i didn’t read the book!

films shouldn’t be compared to their source novels, because they are two entirely different mediums. but having said that, i thought the film did not lose any of the self-reflexive nature of the story. the healing and destructive powers of fiction came right through and connected; it simply cannot fail because it is a story about stories.

and the Oscars are no measure for anything.