Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Atonement (2007)

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Posted by Jonathan M. Crist (Member # 413) on 12-24-2007, 12:21 PM:

It is a phenomenon I will never understand.

You take a contrived, overwrought soap opera.... dress it up in period clothes and British accents... and critics go ga-ga.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 12-25-2007, 11:54 AM:

I was able to see ATONEMENT for free with a movie ticket that came with the PRIDE & PREJUDICE deluxe dvd set and was forced to watch it by last Saturday with a bloody cold I still have. The movie opened in a very few theatres on December 7th but it opened last Friday in only one theatre in Honolulu, the Ward 16. Since the coupon expired two days after it opened here, I was forced to see it when I was sick because I only heard good things about it. How was it? It was extremely boring and I walked out after watching it for almost an hour and a half and I agree with Jonathan Crist on this one.

-Claude

Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 12-25-2007, 03:31 PM:

I was tortured watching this at Showeast. It is boring, aweful and also disgusting.

=Spoiler Ahead=
There is something seriously wrong with using child rape to develop the plot of a movie.
=End of spoiler=

The only thing that could have made this watchable is if Kiera Knightly was nude during the sex scene but she is fully dressed.

1/2 star and that's only because I got free popcorn, soda and candy at the screening.

Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 12-30-2007, 03:01 PM:

...................SPOILERS AHEAD!............................

In the beginning was the word...

Thou shalt not bear false witness...

The sound track loudly proclaims the first theme by the clacking of a typewriter over a dark screen. We become aware thet this is a literary film, based on Ian McEwan's novel.

"What is the worst word you can possibly think of?"

Words form Briony's hobby as child playwright; Robby's mis-delivered words cause Briony to act, because of jealousy and sexual immaturity, bearing false witness after a crime is committed, leading to disasterous events. The clacking Coronas
continue their chorus of doom.

Words connect the actions through letters, and the need for atonement, through speech and writings, tortures all three characters. Atonement is thwarted until Briony, grown old, con-fesses by writing the story we have just seen, in a book. Has she finally completed her atonement, albeit too late for all?

Briony the successful author, at the film's conclusion, is played by Helen Mirin, who manages to look convincingly like the child actor playing young Briony. This is a familiar role for Ms Mirin, having played Inspector Jane Tennyson in the long running British TV series shown on PBS in the US as "Prime Suspect." As Inspector Tennyson, she often indicts and prosecutes perverts and child molestors; in "Atonement" she causes suffering to the innocent man she had a crush on as a child.

I like the crisp portrayal of British upper-class life, photographed outdoors in sunshine and indoors and at night with
much attention to shadows and darkness. Being somewhat an Anglophile, I find refreshing British speech and historical re-creations, as in "The Forsyte Saga" and "Brideshead Revisited"
shown on Masterpiece Theater on PBS. I love seeing the carriages, costumes, old cars and mansions.

But I didn't like the use of camera shake and mis-focus to blurr the sex scene, although the director probably wanted to convey Briony's shock at witnesing the lovers' tryst and not cmprehending their love. To me it appeared clumsy. And I was initially puzzled by some scenes being shown twice, until at the end, I understood they were shown once as witnessed by a child, and again as mature Briony wrote them in her book of atonement.

Joe Wright and his art director created a massive inferno in depicting the chaos at Dunkirk. I have always thought of Dunkirk as a heroic rescue by a vast armada of civilian pleasure and fishing boats, of the British and French armies ambushed there. I had only seen newsreel footage from the air.
But "Atonement" showed none of that. Instead the film shows undisciplined men, many wounded and dying, and others drunk or without hope of rescue, as morale and chains of command broke down.

And the scenes of Robert, the housekeeper's son, taken from university to prison and then wandering behind German lines to Dunkirk, remind me of similar wandering in "The Longest Day" another anti-heroic war film.

I liked this film, though I think the Dunkirk episode, great as it is in art direction and cinematography, is capable of forming an entirely other film. I found "Atonement" absorbing but over-long.

Monday, December24, 2007 at Kew Gardens Cinema 1:00 PM

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 12-30-2007, 08:49 PM:

Far from being a disappointment, I found this film to be captivating. It actually felt rather contemporary to me, despite the period setting. I found it captured the confusion of adolesence and approaching puberty with all the mystery and terror that it can elicit. Although time play is becoming a bit of a cliche in cinema these days, it still managed to work here. A bravura piece of filmmaking

Viewed at Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena 12/26/07. Surprisingly, this film was FLAT, but was well projected with OK SRD.

Posted by Paul Burt (Member # 3743) on 01-07-2008, 12:24 PM:

In general, an excellent film, well acted and directed. The six minute long tracking shot of the evacuation at Dunkirk was extraordinarily intense and believable. 4.5/5.

Posted by Aaron Burgess (Member # 3875) on 01-08-2008, 07:13 AM:

old women love this movie. i do not.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 01-08-2008, 09:29 AM:

At 68 years old, I usually like this kind of movie, but I totally disliked this film. The only thing I liked about this movie was the music and I downloaded it from iTunes to my new iPod touch and I am enjoying it

-Claude

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 04-21-2008, 12:50 AM:

That was Vanessa Redgrave, not Helen Mirren (correct spelling).

I was intrigued by the subtitles with a grey transparent background. Presumably this was to fix some cases of subtitles being unreadable on bright scenes. It seemed to work OK.

I enjoyed the movie, perhaps unabashedly (despite having gotten two prints of it, neither of which were particularly great).

--jhawk

Posted by Mike Schindler (Member # 1309) on 04-22-2008, 08:53 AM:

Paul Thomas Anderson tells a story about how he snuck into a second-run theater to watch BOOGIE NIGHTS, and was horrified the presentation. The print was damaged, the anamorphic lens was out of alignment, the sound was mono, etc. At first he was really upset. But then he thought to himself, "Does the movie still work? If it doesn't, that means I haven't done my job as a filmmaker."

I think this is true. If a movie can't still be enjoyed, no matter how bad the print may be, then it's probably not a good movie to begin with.

That being said, I don't think even a pristine 70mm print of ATONEMENT would make it worth watching.