Atonement rant herein

[msagara]

braider said:

I liked Atonement largely for the sex scene; out of curiosity, if you can do so, can you provide a bulleted list of the 5-10 top issues you have with the story? (Note that I've only seen the movie, never read the book.)

I had no issues with most of the movie, for what it's worth.

No, let me rephrase that. I had severe issues with the way it was marketed as "the most romantic movie of the year", but I didn't fall for that because with a title like Atonement, no one expects a happy ending of the general hollywood romantic variety.

I will agree with you: there was something about the way that sex scene was filmed that was astonishing to me -- because in general, I squirm my way in embarrassment through most sex scenes in any movie I can think of off the top of my head. What was interesting to me, in interviews around the movie's release, was the fact that the director choreographed everything in that scene, according to both actors (MacAvoy really appreciated this). He knew what he wanted it to feel like, and it worked.

He was also the director of the Knightly Pride and Prejudice, and that's literally the only version of P&P where, during the argument/proposal sequence, I suddenly realized that they were incredibly attracted to each other. I've never felt that before.

Oops, that was a digression.

I thought Keira Knightly and Ken MacAvoy were really, really powerful as a couple. I thought the story was a train wreck, because you could see it all coming in a sort of terrible greek tragedy way: the self-absorbed and crushing younger sister, the wrong letter, the different class backgrounds--everything.

I could accept the horror of the younger sister's youthful jealousy, and combined with her lack of experience and lack of understanding of the full costs her lie would incur, it was human, and painful. Did I like the younger sister? Well, no. But I believed her, and even though her lie destroyed two lives, I couldn't hate her because it was so clear she was young in that stupid and thoughtless way the young can often be. It was in all ways a tragedy.

I thought the single shot film of the beach scene was stunning. I thought most of the film was stunning. I knew, when Robbie was wondering around in a delirium and he stumbled across his mother that he was already all but dead, and it was painful. Believable. True.

So I didn't believe it was all going to end well; everything about it was structurally wrong for that. I was prepared for everything to end the way it essentially did.

The sister does grow up. The sister does gain an understanding of the horror into which her actions sent Robbie; the sister does begin to understand how horrifically wrong she was. There were good scenes there. But.

Imagine my profound relief when the younger sister, now a woman, goes to attempt to make amends with her older sister and Robbie? Robbie who I was certain certain certain was dead? Imagine my slow sense of allowing myself to be happy or hopeful about the future they just might be able to build for themselves given the horrors of the past few years and the time they lost because of a young girl's very ugly lie?

Imagine that.

Because honestly, I let myself believe what was on the screen; I wanted to believe it. I really did.

I was therefore unprepared for the story's "gotcha". I did believe and allow myself some hope for their happiness, and only then is it made clear that that hope and that possibility is all a big lie--that it's the younger sister's swan song. Robbie did, as it was perfectly obvious he must, die. I wasn't expecting Ceci's death as well; that was less obviously telecast, at least to me.

It was…it was the type of very calculated gotcha that immediately sent me sky high because it seemed designed to heighten only misery and pain, and for no point. It was already painful. What, you needed to give me some sense of hope or peace so you could laugh in my face when you pulled it out from under me?

Add to that that the sister has written about the truth for the first time in her life because she is dying and that she feels that writing this happy ending somehow gives them the happy ending in perpetuity. That somehow, this -- her writing -- makes up for their deaths which, imho, she unarguably, if unintentionally caused, is a profound criticism of the solipsism of writers and their attachment to their creative process.

She felt that because she had written a happy ending for them, she had atoned. In a way, this makes it clear that they were never real for her. That she never cared for them as people (although he certainly was emotionally invested in both).

I couldn't believe it.

So the movie went from being a tragedy, with which in the end I would have been fine, to a mean-spirited act of emotional cruelty and a mockery of what the word atonement actually means.

Comments

[msagara.livejournal.com]

I agree with almost all of this. I saw the last bit as her feeble attempt for atonement. She knew she *could not* properly make atonement, but was doing the best she could in the only way she knew how, having already nursed the soldiers to the best of her ability, which was part of the atonement.

Interesting that you saw it as an act of solipsism and pandering to her creative process; I saw it as the only thing she felt she could do to try to make things right.

Would be interesting to hear the author's goals.

I would accept this without reservation if not for her own words at the end. There is no responsible away to equate actual, living happiness with the fictionalized daydream elements of her novel -- and by saying that these were equivalent, or even in some ways better, she lost the sense of the attempt in the ... smugness of the statement.

For me.

If she had said: Look, I killed them. I regret it. This is my dream of what they might have had were it not for me, I would have been far, far less outraged.

But the equation of her fiction with their reality... not so much.

[braider.livejournal.com]

Ah. I did not at all remember her manner of stating it. I'll have to borrow it from the library and watch it again at some point.