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REVIEWS | Issue: "Signs and wonders" January 26, 2008

Movies

Fragile love

Atonement is a mature and heartbreaking romance | Sam Thielman

Anybody who tells you that Atonement is a love story either didn't see the movie or really disliked it. Joe Wright's adroit adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel is less about enduring love (the title of another McEwan book) than it is about fragile love.

"The story can resume," writes Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) desperately, after 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) misunderstands the lower-class Robbie's passion for her aristocratic older sister. Briony sets off a chain of events that thrusts distance, class, and prison bars between Robbie and Cecilia (Keira Knightley).

Love for Robbie and Cecilia is not intimate but distant, and thus perfect and unattainable.

This mature and heartbreaking treatment of romance might earn the film some attention all by itself (it just won the "Best Drama" Golden Globe), but Joe Wright's astonishing skill with the camera pushes Atonement from the realm of the merely interesting to the sublime.

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January 26, 2008, Vol. 23, No. 2

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