Atonement and Redemption

(This is a spoiler, so if you plan on watching the movie, don't read on!)

Yesterday, my friend David and I went to see Atonement. We had planned on catching the early afternoon show but turns out it was cancelled and we had to wait 3 hours until the next show. We walked around, did some shopping, had a really nice lunch sitting outside at Samovar, and then walked back to the theatre. Got settled in, with what I thought were the best seats in the house. (You need to be able to prop your feet up during a good movie!)

Now let me rewind a bit. I started reading the book a few years ago. I think I was still living in Boston at the time. During the first 80 pages or so, maybe even 120 pages, I understood what all the hype was about. It was great. Engaging, sensual, beautifully written, and by all means a page turner! The suspense builds slowly and you're sitting there hyperventilating, thinking, "No, no, no, don't do it," but you have no say, of course, as a reader, and the worst happens. Robbie, the housekeeper's son, is accused of raping little Lola, by the overimaginative little sister of the love of his life. He gets taken away to prison. The section ends. The next section begins, 4 years from that first day. And suddenly you're in Robbie's point-of-view, in the middle of a war. The writer rambles on about what's on fire, who's dying, how many days are passing... and it goes on, for pages and pages. I lost interest and put the book down. Permanently.

During the movie, the same thing happened. I kept waiting for it to go back to the hope and promise of the beginning, but it never does. When the war scenes started, both David and I lost focus. There's a lot of wandering from one place to the next and you don't quite get what the point is of it all. Eventually, both Robbie and his lover, Cecilia, never reunited, die. Cecilia's younger sister, who is no longer a little girl, realizes the gravity of her lie, and tries to make amends but she is unable to. She spends the rest of her life writing and rewriting the story, obsessed with bringing the two lovers together, at least in the fiction of a novel, since because of her, it never happened during their lives.

I was disappointed at first (and I still am, somewhat) but later, thinking about the reasoning behind the author's choices, and from what I know about writing, I had an aha! moment. The film/construction of the story mirrored the events of the story. It was about Atonement, which never comes. (It's painful, actually, how much nostalgia and yearning is carried through that last hour of the film.) It is something a lot of writers strive for, something that has always impressed me, when successfully managed. It is the idea of "form equals content", which the director did a brilliant job of achieving. As a viewer, I kept waiting for something to happen, for things to get better, but the point of the story was that they never did get better. And suddenly, in my eyes, the film redeemed itself.