"How old do you have to be before you know the difference between right and wrong? Do you have to be 18 before you can own up to a lie?"
Robbie (James McAvoy)
Sometimes people pay for mistakes all their lives — and sometimes people pay for mistakes with their lives.
"Atonement," which premiered on this day in 2007, was about both.
It was a rather complex plot, centering around Saoirse Ronan, who played a precocious 13–year–old aspiring writer from an upper–crust British family in the years before the outbreak of World War II. As the movie began, she had just finished writing a play and planned to put on something of a backyard production of the play starring her visiting cousins.
Mind you, when I say backyard, her family had quite a backyard. You could accommodate a sizable stage and a considerable audience there.
Briony (Ronan's character's name) was, as people that age so often are, given to flights of fancy.
She also had a bit of a schoolgirl crush on the son of the family's housekeeper (James McAvoy), who was bound for Cambridge thanks to his mother's employer. But Robbie was attracted to Briony's older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley).
And one day Briony observed interaction between Robbie and Cecilia — from afar. Cecilia stripped to her underclothes, then plunged into a fountain pond, then re–emerged a short time later, all while Robbie watched. The audience later learned that it had been an entirely innocent act that, having been misinterpreted, went on to form the nucleus of other false assumptions and accusations that ultimately sent Robbie to prison.
Four years later Robbie was serving in World War II, having agreed to serve in the military in exchange for his release from prison. An older and somewhat wiser Briony was regretting what she had said and sought the forgiveness of her sister, discovering that she and Robbie had reunited and Robbie was on leave from the war.
They had a confrontation, and Briony agreed to have her testimony changed and the official record altered. But there was a problem. One of the cousins who had been visiting the house that summer had been sexually assaulted by a man she had not seen. Briony had initially claimed it was Robbie, having seen the episode by the fountain and read an explicit note Robbie had written while working on drafts of apologies to Cecilia for his behavior, but the assailant turned out to be a friend of Briony's brother. She had realized that when she saw the cousin marrying this man — which meant that she could not be used as a supporting witness for Briony's revised account of events.
And if Briony went to the authorities to change her story, she would be regarded as an unreliable witness. Robbie's name could not be cleared in the public record.
But then the audience was thrown a curve.
And, with the noteworthy exceptions of the finales of "The Sixth Sense" or "Psycho," it just might be the best twist ending I have ever seen.
Briony, now in her 70s (played by Vanessa Redgrave), was being interviewed on TV. Apparently she had grown into a professional writer and was speaking about her latest book. It would also be her final book, she told the interviewer, because she was dying of vascular dementia, "which is essentially a continuous series of tiny strokes. Your brain gradually closes down. You lose words, you lose your memory: which, for a writer, is pretty much the point. That's why I could finally write this book; and why, of course, it's my last novel. Strangely enough, it would be just as accurate to call it my first novel. I wrote several drafts as far back as my time at St. Thomas's Hospital during the war. I just couldn't ever find the way to do it."
Briony explained that Robbie and Cecilia never reconciled. Robbie had died of an infection at Dunkirk and Cecilia died a few months later during an air raid.
Briony, who apparently never changed her hairstyle in the 60–plus years covered in the movie, had written the book — including that confrontation that never happened — to give them the happy ending they were deprived in life.
It was an interesting twist on the traditional coming–of–age movies I have seen. The problem with coming–of–age movies is that too many of them treat that time of life as a magical mystery tour that sometimes features lapses in judgment. This story spanned a lifetime and addressed the kind of real mistakes that the young often make — and sometimes must live with for the rest of their lives.
And it contained a touch that, as a writer, I can appreciate.
It used the staccato pounding of typewriter keys as part of the score — largely because of Briony's determined development as a writer but also Robbie's hesitant typing of the drafts of his apology to Cecilia.
It was a very effective touch and probably deserved a special Academy Award nomination.
As it was, though, "Atonement" received seven Oscar nominations — and won for Best Original Score so I suppose it was rewarded for that.
Ronan received the movie's only acting nomination but lost Best Supporting Actress to Tilda Swinton.
