Watched Atonement last night and I understand why it is an Oscar nominee. Every year, the Academy is virtually obligated to nominate some epic period piece, in recent years often about World War II. This year, it's Atonement.
Don't get me wrong. It was a fine film. Well made. Well acted. But it's not in the same league as No Country for Old Men, which is my personal favorite from this year.
I read a review of Atonement earlier this year which said something about how the character very nearly achieves something like actual atonement. The character in question is a girl, Briony Tallis, who sends a man to prison by providing false testimony. As one might imagine, this has a detrimental effect on his life and the life of Briony's sister who was in love with the man.
The movie has been out for a while, so I am going to discuss the ending. So, fair warning: spoilers ahead.
Throughout the movie, Briony is shown writing. At the beginning of the movie, it's a play, in the middle it's a novel. At the end, she is discussing a novelization of the story of the movie. She is an old woman and is dying. So, she finally completes an autobiographical novel where she tells the whole story. Why she lied, how she lied, and how she came to realize the full import of her actions. But it's a novel because she changes the ending. Both her sister and the man she sent to prison died in World War II, and thus she has been unable to remedy her actions. For the novel, she changes the ending of the story so that her sister and the man both live and are reunited--so that at least in her story they have the years of happiness that they deserved.
Writing out that description, it is quite a bit more powerful than what I experienced while watching it in the theater. (That may be attributable to the single worst audience I've ever sat with.) I was going to complain that writing a fictional ending to a real story doesn't really do much to atone for the harm that she caused as a child. But for an old woman, dying, that is the best she can offer. Unfortunately, we don't know how she spent the rest of her life. We know that she spent some time working as a nurse and skipped going to college as some form of personal flagellation, but that's about it. It would have been nice to know how the rest of her life was affected.
Anyway, decent flick. Worth a rental.
