Atonement (2007)

I have to say, I was surprised by this one. Very surprised. Okay, I didn’t expect it to be awful, but I didn’t expect it to blow me away either. But it did.

It’s a little difficult to describe the plot without giving the game away but here’s a taster. Essentially a love story which has to endure a misunderstanding with horrendous consequences, the film charts the lives of Robbie (James McAvoy) and Cecilia (Keira Knightley) as they attempt to get back to one another. I shouldn’t say any more.

The set-up, the first half an hour to forty minutes or so, is superb, faultless, film-making, with the possible exception that the audience is left in no doubt about some things it might have been better to leave them in doubt about. It then loses its way before ending everything pitch-perfect and allowing the tears to flow.

I don’t like, nor have I ever liked, Keira Knightley. I find her performances typically hollow and unconvincing. Not here though. She’s not top five for 2007 quality (or most other years for that matter) but she delivers a performance that is certainly noteworthy, although she is upstaged by the excellent Saorise Ronan, who plays the jealous, confused, spiteful, younger sister to perfection. Although there’s more for Ronan to play with and the character has much more to her than Knightley’s, the delivery is excellent and well worthy of a top five finish.

I do like, and have long liked, James McAvoy but felt a bit like he didn’t have much to do here. Although I didn’t find the two lead characters all that challenging, the chemistry between them was again, pitch-perfect, especially in the first act which fizzles and cracks like electric summer thunder. It’s a shame this wasn’t quite sustained. If it had have been there was definite A+ quality in the material and the staging. It’s not quite there but it’s not far away either and I can certainly see myself returning to it and I don’t normally say that for films like this. This had something about it, that great, indefinable, quality that lingers long in the mind, put there by a quality film’s sinewy tangles, threads and mysteries.

Recommended.

A-