Halfway into his 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Joe Wright’s camera enters the hallways and rooms of an estate with several suites dedicated to smoking, gossiping and dancing. Fluidly drifting through encounters and gestures, the camera picks up the remnants of conversations both benign and interesting. It is a miraculous and graceful scene that palpably exudes the feeling of being caught in a nest of gadflies.
The same kind of shot can be found in Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, though the setting is now 1930’s France. Three soldiers from London come upon a beach filled with military men waiting to return to their respective homelands. The camera glides past sergeants executing diseased horses, a choir of damaged infantrymen and dozens of stricken battalions. Smoke billows from scrap fires and a looming Ferris wheel turns in the near-distance as the three English soldiers make their way into a bar.

In Prejudice, the camera’s journey picked up on the prevalence of the social mores and attitudes of the time. But Atonement isn’t about togetherness or social networking at all. Instead, it is about the ways we are separated and how we scatter into memories both fictional and real; and it’s ultimately about one girl’s obsession with the neatness and calculation of drama.

Briony (Saoirse Ronan) has just finished writing a play when we meet her, and has decided to stage her play for her brother’s homecoming with her cousin Lola (Juno Temple) in the lead. On a break from rehearsals, she witnesses her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) in a strange exchange with Robbie (James McAvoy), a gardener and the son of their cook (Brenda Blethyn). Unknown to anyone, an attraction between the pair has been brewing for years.

Briony, only 13, starts projecting her own story onto what she witnessed. Her imagination has even more to play with when she reads a note from Robbie to Cecilia and, later, finds them together in Cecilia’s room. The chance to launch her fiction into reality presents itself when Briony finds Lola being raped by a man whom she fingers as Robbie. For five years, Robbie is remanded to the army, while Cecilia tries to build a life for the both of them back home. Meanwhile, Briony trains as a nurse as an act of penance for her flights of fantasy.

Often regarded as one of the best books of the last decade, McEwan’s novel is largely about the spaces that language can create, and, in the sprawling structure of Cecilia and Briony’s home, Wright finds that and gives the film an impressive sense of detail with help from cinematographer Seamus McGarvey. Wright’s concentration is at times stupendous, especially when studying the differences between actual action and Briony’s perception. But as he moves outwards towards the landscapes of Robbie’s regiment and the methodical day-to-days of Briony’s nurse station, he loses the hushed details and his hold on the central theme comes loose.

Wright’s biggest problem is in conveying the loneliness and isolation felt by the three characters. With Briony caught mainly in medium shots and in few instances alone, her wanting to atone doesn’t come across as a struggle but rather as an act of marking time. And when the filmmaker returns to the fictionalizing and neatness of dreamt fiction, the transition from imagined drama to reality grows tedious. For both Briony and Wright, setting a personal tone to an existing story comes with the incapability of knowing the damage one can inflict.

Chris Cabin