Joe Wright
Atonement-Espiazione

When Briony Tallis, at just thirteen years old, realizes she has become a writer, she does not know she's playing with fire. Hers is an innocent little play, a fairy tale that she should have staged with the help of her cousins, Lola and the two twins, to celebrate the return to the family's country estate of her brother Leon and his friend, Paul Marshall. Germany looms increasingly threatening over Europe, the war is at the gates, but in the Tallis household, the only disturbance its inhabitants seem to notice is the summer heat. Another perfect day for Briony, made special by the arrival of her beloved brother, yet something goes wrong. Cecilia, her older sister, has a strange relationship with the humble servant's son, Robbie, a relationship that the eyes of a child cannot yet fully understand. The passion between the two lovers is misunderstood and a series of clues provided by Briony herself, also disturbed by the desire to avenge her unrequited childhood crush on Robbie, leads to the boy being accused of raping young Lola. He ends up in prison, and paradoxically, he is freed by the need for men at the front, she becomes a nurse, but the war, chance, History will definitively divide them, forcing Briony to seek her atonement.

Joe Wright's breakthrough in directing a feature film in 2005 had put him in the spotlight in the eyes of critics and the public, and both categories shattered into a myriad of diverging opinions. "Pride and Prejudice" was praised by many for the linearity of the narrative, for a witty Keira Knightley, for the clear photography, while it was also criticized for its excessive glamour, for a mannered rendition of Jane Austen's splendid novel. With "Atonement," he tries again, adapting the eponymous work by the famous writer Ian McEwan. True, there is no debate about the proportions between the aforementioned and Austen, but "Atonement" is far from being a simple novel. After all, one always approaches films based on a novel with suspicion, especially if one has loved it or loves the author. But the English director proves confident and proud of his product when last year he opened the Venice Film Festival with "Atonement."

The screenplay is entrusted to Christopher Hampton ("Dangerous Liaisons"), who has to face an essential problem of adapting the book. In McEwan's novel, the narration is set according to a singular criterion that also evades the overused flashback mode: in the epilogue, the sense of the entire book is concentrated because only at the conclusion does the reader come to understand that the now-adult Briony has exposed a diversion to the real course of events, allowing Cecilia and Robbie, at least on paper, not to be separated by death, thus purifying her conscience, regretful for having divided them. To avoid the screenplay getting tangled in itself due to total adherence to the book, in the movie the terms are inverted and the entire film flows, leaving Briony's revelation as an elderly woman to the end, evoking more a noisy and banal twist than the suggestion of the work from which it is derived. For many, this aspect may appear as a cunning trick of the director and the screenwriter, but in reality, it would be better to qualify it as a necessary expedient, starting from the premise that the big screen cannot afford the luxuries which literature has the faculty to indulge in, an expedient further compensated by numerous other elements.

As far as the set design, photography, and costumes are concerned, Joe Wright and his entire staff take an extremely meticulous care. The aesthetic perfection of the film could even mislead, leading to the suspicion of masking scarce substance beneath the splendid portraits of the English countryside (with which he had already delighted in his debut) and the grim life at the front, despite proving to be occasionally excessive, as in the baroque lingering of the camera on detail. The soundtrack, the work of our Dario Marianelli, who won the 2008 Oscar for "Atonement's" music, does not remain a simple backdrop to the story but intervenes with the constant ticking of a typewriter. The actors manage to align with the good overall rendering. Excluding the great Vanessa Redgrave, who graces us with her presence in the last minutes of the film in the role of a Briony resigned to illness and proven by her path of repentance, Saoirse Ronan, James McAvoy, and the entire supporting cast meet expectations. Knightley herself, who has not always maintained her levels in the past, exerts herself to the maximum this time, and her performance provides the first signs of a certain maturity.

"...How can a novelist atone for the wrongdoing when her absolute power of deciding others fates makes her akin to God? There is no one, no higher entity she can appeal to, for reconciliation, for forgiveness. There is nothing outside of her. It is her imagination that sets the limits and the terms of the story. There is no atonement for God, or for the novelist, not even if they were atheists. It has always been an impossible task, and that's precisely the point. It all resolves in the attempt."                                  "Atonement"- Ian McEwan