Atonement by Paul Bullock

Violins swell, sumptuous shots of expansive manors, the English countryside and the chaos at Dunkirk flash up on screen and, at the end, Husky Voiceover Man sighs the word Atonement with his usual self-important grandeur. This is the striking trailer for Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s million-selling and multiple-award winning 2001 novel. Handsomely mounted, full of the kind of prestige you’d expect from a British period-set film, but curiously free of plot, it’s more or less indicative of a film which is ravishing visually, but ever so slightly empty.

Naturally, there’s far more story crammed into the two-hour running length of the finished film (perhaps even too much), and just as on McEwan’s page, this intricate tale of war, romance and, yes, atonement is told in three different parts (four including the short modern-day epilogue). Part One is set on the upper-crust Tallis Estate in the 1930s. We are introduced to thirteen-year-old budding writer Briony (a stunningly precocious turn from young Saoirse Ronan) and her elder sister Cecilia (Kiera Knightly), a hoity-toity lady of leisure who has an on-off love affair with her housekeeper’s son Robbie (James McAvoy).

The trio’s fates clash on one hot summer’s day when Briony, having intercepted a saucy letter between the other two, accuses Robbie of sexually assaulting her sixteen-year-old cousin. After spending several years in prison, Robbie is then shipped off to war and his troubles in France, interspersed with brief meetings with Cecilia, form the film’s second part. As for Briony, the third part depicts her as an eighteen-year-old nurse working in the makeshift hospitals of wartime London and gradually coming to realise that the mistakes she made as a child will not be easy to make up for.

This is the film‘s thesis, McEwan’s story pondering the reality of atonement and the role fiction can play in achieving it. But by keeping the author’s basic structure in the jump to the big-screen, scriptwriter Christopher Hampton squanders it somewhat, making the story seem stagey and episodic (despite the use of some old Rashomon tricks) and most damagingly turning the older Briony's desperate bid to make amends (and the film’s intellectual thrust) into a gimmicky twist that's difficult to engage with.

What the film needs then is a passionate central relationship to highlight Briony's pain through showing us the beauty that she destroyed. McAvoy, now an accomplished serious actor after his impressive turn in The Last King of Scotland, is perfect for Robbie, bringing his usual easy charm to a character who could have been rather stale and cliché. Knightly, on the other hand, seems well out of her depth, the plummy tones that served her so well as the elegant foil to Jack Sparrow’s roguish anarchy in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise now turning her into an ice maiden, unknowable and distant.

But if Knightly struggles to capture the Austen-esque heaving passion, director Joe Wright nails it. From the dreamy warmth of rural England to the harsh coldness of wartime France, there’s a beauty to this film that echoes the classic prestige pictures of Britain’s cinematic past. Yet this is still a McEwan novel, and Wright also conveys the writer’s insistent sense of foreboding (and his film altering twist) with a ghostly shooting style that reaches its peak when he ambitiously captures the haunting aftermath of Dunkirk with a technically astonishing five-minute, single-take tracking shot.

Similar ambitious brilliance is seen in Seamus McGarvey’s sumptuous cinematography and heard in Dario Marianelli’s breathtaking score, which uses the clacking of typewriter keys to make the film sound like a ticking time bomb, patiently and unnervingly waiting to explode. Except, it never quite does. For all its grand visuals, Atonement, quite fittingly considering it’s about a doomed romance, is a film which constantly flirts with greatness, without ever really managing to consummate the relationship.