Blood and Guts - Page 5


Joe (Pride and Prejudice) Wright has made Atonement into a grand film of love and war, akin to The English Patient or War and Peace. Keira (Pride and Prejudice) Knightley is Cecilia Tallis, the princess of a grand English country house. James (Last King of Scotland) McAvoy is the housekeeper's son, Robbie Turner, who loves her. Knightley's little sister, Briony, is played successively by Saoirse Ronan as a romantically intoxicated child at 13, Romola Garai as a nurse at 18, and Vanessa Redgrave as a successful novelist in old age.

Briony, misunderstanding everything around her, falsely accuses Robbie of a crime that sends him to prison for many years. He's released when he agrees to enlist in the war and ends up at Dunkirk, where the retreating British and French troops wait on the beach to be rescued or killed. Both Cecilia and Briony have become nurses and hear the stories of the wounded and dying. Briony yearns for a way of atoning for her offense, and finds to her grief that there is none, except perhaps by writing a novel about it—a novel in which she restores to the young lovers the lives of which she deprived them in her childhood.

The film has a literary delicacy, a distance from the horrors of rape and war, which lets us enter it calmly and reflect on it as we would on a novel. Instead of trying to shock us into alertness, it makes us think, discreetly pulling away from the sight of blood. Its most prominent "special effect" is a gigantic close-up of a single, typewritten vulgarity.

The last portion of the film is at Dunkirk, where the army waits and dies on the beach. A tracking shot observes the beach from above crowded with dead and dying soldiers for five or six minutes. We're allowed some reflective distance as Robbie experiences war and as, across the channel, the sisters/nurses witness many of the same horrors he sees. All three mature with compassion.

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