Atonement opens in 1935, at a stately manor in the English countryside.
A thirteen-year-old girl, Briony is finishing a play on her typewriter, the typebars banging a martial beat on the white paper. The rat-a-tat-tatting continues, integrating itself into the soundtrack, even as she gets up with her completed draft and marches away.It's a device that recurs throughout the film, effectively linking writing and soldiering, love and war--the two subjects and, to a considerable degree, two halves of the film. The girl is Briony and she has a sister, Cecilia.
Robbie is the son of the family housekeeper, who works for the family too.
Robbie wants to express his longing for Cecilia and writes a letter for her.
He entrusts it to Briony. Because Briony has a schoolgirl crush on Robbie, she reads the note. And that four-letter word, barely understood by a prepubescent girl, hits her like a sledgehammer.
Briony's false witness, for which she will seek atonement for the rest of her life as a nurse and author, forever alienates Cecilia from her family and puts Robbie in jail for three years, until he is released and joins the war effort.
Thanks to Briony, Robbie stands accused – and the movie spends its remainder unravelling that fateful turn of events, from the war-ravaged wastes of northern France to Blitzed-out London, through to a modern-day coda featuring Vanessa Redgrave as the elderly Briony explaining her contrition to a television interviewer.
Without giving too much away, I will say that the power of the story depends on its believability, on the audience’s ability to perceive Robbie and Cecilia in wartime as suffering, flesh-and-blood creatures. McAvoy and Knightley sigh and swoon credibly enough, but they are stymied by the inertia of the filmmaking, and by the film’s failure to find a strong connection between the fates of the characters and the ideas and historical events that swirl around them.
