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Adaptation Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 151152

The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press.

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FILM REVIEW

AtonementThe Surface of Things

Atonement. Dir. Joe Wright. Perf. Kiera Knightley, James McAvoy, and

Vanessa Redgrave, 2007.

Ian McEwans self-consciously literary 2001 novel concerns itself with maladaptation

and the processes of apology when there is no mechanism for seeking forgiveness. From

its carefully realized opening recreation of the Tallis familys country house in the 1930s,

Joe Wrights film accordingly highlights misperception and the failure of empathy. We

are offered, as in the novel, two perspectives on the Jamesian seminal scene of figures

beside a fountain, where a complex love triangle comes to the boil one hot June day

when a vase is broken and Cecilia Tallis (Kiera Knightley) strips off to retrieve a brokenpiece from the water. A first perspective is that of the 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse

Ronan) watching from behind one of the houses upper windows and a second is that

shared by the two figures, housekeepers son Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) and

Cecilia. Here as elsewhere, the film pointedly shows contrasting viewpoints, and at the

end of the second true telling of the fountain scene the camera focuses on the fantasist

Briony, who looks steadily at the viewer and invites our complicity or sympathy.

This double-telling and double-taking, playing false perception against esse est percipi,

is repeated in Robbie and Cecilias later library sex scene, again witnessed by Briony.

Both scenes in fact imitate the lesson of the two letters that Robbie writes to Cecilia: shehas seen the wrong version, Robbie says, because his sexually explicit typed note was

never meant to be read; which is doubly true in that it was certainly never meant to be

read by Briony. That texts and perceptions are versions is underlined repeatedly, draw-

ing attention to the films status as adaptation, a visually realized rendition of Brionys

final but not faithful version of events.

That Briony has watched the seminal fountain scene from behind glass feeds into a

series of identity motifs concerned with water, mirrors, and the transparency of barri-

ers: as when Cecilia jumps into the country houses lake to swim and the ensuing shot

reveals Robbie surfacing in a tub of bathwater; soon afterwards, we are shown Brionywriting a romance about a lady in a lake and Sir Romulus the most dangerous man in

the world. Later, after her false accusation of him for the sexual attack on Lola, Briony

again watches from a window as Robbie is taken away by the police a man she has

condemned but will never be able to rescue, as she once forced him to rescue her by

pretending to drown.

The rescue attempt by the sea at Dunkirk forms the backdrop to the middle section

of the film, introduced as Northern France 4 years later. This is the story of Robbies

post-prison military duty, after which, he repeatedly says, the story can resume, just as

Cecilias parallel refrain to him is Come back to me. The emphasis, however, is onfailure and betrayal of the lovers once more, exemplified by the chaos Robbie finds on

the beach and the 300,000 men waiting there to be taken hometo resume their

stories. Though not revealed until later, Robbie in fact dies here of septicaemia,

presumably as a result of the chest wound we see him prod earlier; an officer has already

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152 PETER CHILDS

told him that the wounded are to be left behind. Prior to his death, Robbie hallucinates

a scene in which his mother bathes his feet, intimating his role as Christlike class martyr

sacrificed by Briony as the Dunkirk soldiers seem to be offered up for death or salvation.

He says repeatedly I have to get back to put things right, a further indication that it is

Brionys regretful words issuing from his mouth.

Faithful to the novels structure, the third section of the film is London 3 weeks ear-

lier, and the clicking of a typewriter returns over the soundtrack as a 17-year-old

Briony (Romola Garai) looks out at London from a hospital window. To emphasize her

authorial role, as she walks along the St. Thomas ward corridor each of the lights above

clicks on to the sound of typewriter keys being struck. Briony has by now begun to write

her story, Two Figures by a Fountain and her job as a nurse appears as penance too.

When soldiers come in from the British Expeditionary Force in France, Briony imagines

she sees Robbie, then a propaganda newsreel chronicles the tragedy of Dunkirk, which

is retold as not retreat and failure but a victory of retrieval, like the one Briony attempts

through her fictional account of Robbie and Cecilias reunion.

The films coda, set in the present, departs most sharply from the novel, presumably

to foreground its own medium. With nods to the opening scene of reminiscence in

Joseph Loseys film adaptation (scripted by Harold Pinter) of L. P. Hartleys novel, The

Go-Between, a key intertext for McEwans story, Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) is interviewed

in a television studio about the publication of her latest novel,Atonement. She is dying of

vascular dementia and this will be her last novel, as it was also the first she ever drafted.

She is now losing her memory, but says I wrote several drafts as far back as my time at

St. Thomass hospital. She declares that she cannot see what good would be served byrecounting the truth, and so her novel invents a happy future for her loversthough

Robbie died beside Brae dunes and Cecilia was killed later that year. Underscoring the

dominant water imagery, Cecilia is shown drowned in the flooded tube station, killed by

the bomb that destroyed the Balham gas water mains. What satisfaction could a reader

derive from such an ending?, Briony asks; and her final act of kindness is to give them

their happiness through fiction. So, the film closes with a projected fantasy of Robbie

and Cecilia as lovers embracing on a beach, bringing Christopher Hamptons in-many-

ways fine adaptation to a clichd romantic closure that both washes over the hardness

in McEwans novel and the war deaths atAtonements centre.Yet, the most surprising aspect to Wrights film is the retention of Brionys position

as novelist, which leaves the status of the film we have watched somewhat unclear. The

postmodern twist in the novel reveals the previous narrative as one draft, the final ver-

sion, of Brionys novel, yet the film we have seen can only figure once more as a version

of that novel, and this is a dimension to the adaptation the film fails to explain or

explore.

REFERENCESHartley, L. P. The Go-Between. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953.

McEwan, Ian.Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.

The Go-Between. Dir. Joseph Losey. Perf. Julie Christie, Alan Bates. EMI, 1970.

Professor Peter Childs

doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apn017 University of Gloucestershire

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