MOVIES .

Method to the Madness

Atonement's plot turns on differing points of view, so it's only fitting that the people who made it can't seem to agree on a few key points.


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Published: Dec 5, 2007

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Atonement's plot turns on differing points of view, so it's only fitting that the people who made it can't seem to agree on a few key points. Take their view of Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a shy, self-possessed 12-year-old aristocrat in 1939 Britain whose spiteful fabrication sends the family's working-class ward, Robbie (James McAvoy), to prison. Joe Wright, Atonement's director (pictured below, with Keira Knightley), and Christopher Hampton, who adapted Ian McEwan's novel, see in Briony a budding artist who fails to distinguish between the fictions she creates to amuse herself and the impact those fictions have on the real world. McAvoy sees her as a dangerous egotist, or, more to the point, a "fucking psychopath." Romola Garai, who plays the 18-year-old Briony in the movie's second half, tries to preserve the movie's ambiguity, but can't quite suppress her own feelings.

"The film as much as possible tries not to judge her, and I think Joe would kill me if I started leading people down a certain path," Garai says, before proceeding to do just that. "What I think is really interesting is that Ian McEwan, Christopher Hampton and Joe have all allowed Briony, as an artist, to come to the table and say, 'Through my art, I have made myself less morally culpable.' Which I think is a very dangerous road to go down. But maybe artists do believe that about themselves. Let's just say that, for me, the book is very open on that."

Much as it's hard to avoid forming an opinion of Briony, who is in some ways both the story's protagonist and its antagonist, it's impossible to discuss Atonement for long without factoring in its ending, so fair warning: Here be spoilers. Wright preserves the three-part structure of the book, which includes a coda in which much of its second half is revealed to be a novelistic account authored by the elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave), who has rewritten history to diminish the impact of her childhood crime. Whether this represents a kind of fictional gift or an act of supreme egotism is the point under debate.

Wright compounds the shock of the jump from period piece to present day by leaping out of the deliberately stylized performance style of the World War II passages into mannered naturalism, which he presents as just another of Briony's guises. The Method, it turns out, is something of a stalking horse for Wright, who prepped his actors by screening period British classics like Brief Encounter. "I worry that acting is the one department of filmmaking that hasn't really developed in the last 30 years," he says. "Since [Lee] Strasberg came along, everyone's been churning out the same stuff. So I'm interested in trying to discover if there's a new way of doing it, and the only way I can do that is by looking back."

"We were trying to act like the actors of the 1930s," McAvoy says. "You don't drop the cues. You speak quickly. The energy doesn't go down at the end of the line. And unless it's for some reason, you don't pause."

Wright directed his actors to speak in a clipped between-the-wars cadence whose sharp consonants and abbreviated vowel sounds leave precious little room for outward displays of emotion. Keira Knightley, whose snotty blue blood harbors feelings for McAvoy's character that she herself seems to be unaware of, says that the period dialect "really helped to get the idea of these people who are, actually, incredibly emotionally repressed. You're dealing with a period that is the peak of that British stiff upper lip. This girl has these emotions bubbling inside, but she absolutely has no way of expressing them. She doesn't have the language."

The movie's most eerily controlled character is Briony, as played by the astonishing Ronan (currently shooting The Lovely Bones) and Garai, who with Atonement and François Ozon's Angel, comes of age as an actress unafraid of bold and even off-putting choices. In Atonement, she allowed Wright to pose her in perfectly symmetrical compositions to highlight the artificiality of the movie's second section, even conquering her tendency to squint her left eye, which would have spoiled the symmetry of her face.

"I just try as much as possible to be led by the director," she says. "In my limited experience of these things, you don't ever win that conversation. If you go against a director and try to do something ostentatiously different, you just end up with something that's confused. Even if you don't understand what a director's asking you to do, or you don't agree, it's just pointless. You have to go along with it. You don't have the power."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Atonement opens Friday at Ritz Five.