Atonement the movie C/D

i had an alternative thread title for this.

it was pretty rude.

i think put together with that other thread, we can build up a picture of what charlieno4 likes about this film.

I am thrilled at the possibility that the luscious McAvoy may finally be in a watchable film.

My thoughts on the book and (baseless, hysterical) fears for the movie here: "The Child In Time" by Ian McEwan (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

I've not seen it yet, but I've gathered that it's fairly faithful to the book in plot, structure, and concept, which is great in one way, but bollocks in another, because it's made me realise that most of my great, far-flung theories on the book (which I only read this summer, obvlious to the adaptation) are in fact generally-understood tenets. Someone else has hijacked my vision!

To be fair, in the novel McEwan makes you think it's your vision, and then hijacks it himself. It's a fantastic trick, and I'd imagine the film does the same, playing out a meaningless love-story that the selfish reader relates to, with two characters who don't stand for anything but themselves (and, by extension, the reader), before pulling the rug out at the end.

I wonder, however, if the film upholds my Freudian reading of the novel, with discussion of writing and the unconscious, and oodles of ingenious reader suggestion. It's doubtful.

I hate Ian McEwan

Keira Knightley, mark of quality.

I thought it was just incredible for about 77 different reasons

If any of these weren't derived directly from the (brilliantly devious) source text, I'll be amazed.

I, too, had severe Knightley reservations, but again, I'll have to see it for myself before leaping to judgement (as I so shriekingly did on the McEwan thread).

i think put together with that other thread, we can build up a picture of what charlieno4 likes about this film.

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, September 13, 2007 1:10 PM

hey! (um, i don't know what you're getting at, i just feel i should probably be indignant)

xpost many of my 77 reasons are (I think) purely of a cinematic nature - but i haven't read the book so that's admittedly a tough call.

i like war movies but they couldn't even afford stukas :/

Keira Knightley, mark of quality.

Well, the key to avoiding this prejudice was to hit EJECT after the first 30 mins of the first Pirates potboiler. As I did.

30 secs for the sequels

The book is awesomely, obviously cinematic in terms of McEwan's deeply sensual, suggestive prose (and indeed the sets practically draw themselves), but deeply uncinematic in self-referential, reader-conscious literary concept. I'm sure they've managed to do a 'Tristram Shandy' and transposed literary concept onto cinematic concept, however. Thence, presumably, stems your astonishment.

Enrique, the whole POINT of book two was that it wasn't a battle between two sides, it was a battle to restore the reader's happiness by getting one man and one man only back to Britain alive. How else did he generate such unbearable suspense? The whole book dangled Robbie Turner in front of our eyes like a particularly enticing currant bun.

ew gross eng lit students

xp

How else is a young actress supposed to start in films, by making something GOOD? (tho the last version of Pride & Pejudice by this director had its fans)

xpost

wasn't you one? :p

(and c'mon, i'm right)

i think keira knightley scrubs up pretty good.

a scrubber, you say?

Keira's Lizzie Bennett was heavily ripped-off from Jennifer Ehle in the TV series, which she's pretty much admitted, but was still good nonetheless. I think she's terrific in Atonement.

it's made me realise that most of my great, far-flung theories on the book (which I only read this summer, obvlious to the adaptation) are in fact generally-understood tenets

what are they?

To quote a Facebook wall-exchange I recently had:

"The thing about Atonement is that it calls the entire fictional process into account with its astonishing closing page. It ought to have been filmed by Michael Winterbottom or something; the novel deliberately sabotages its own reality through the sabotaging of Bryony's fiction; I'm sure this could have been mirrored filmically. Furthermore, the opening half, set on that one day, unfolds inevitably, the writer psychologically inducing the reader to write the novel before reading it. The reader generally will achieve this, and will continue to do so throughout; this is how the punchline so pulls the rug out from under our feet. Aside from all this, however, the novel is written with a fantastic sensuality; the love-scene is as erotic (tenderly violent) as they come, and the parapraxes he absent-mindedly assigns each character (Robbie's letter, Paul's "You've got to bite it", his own list of tragedies at the start of part two to which Robbie adds his own, thus placing his very self, Ian McEwan, amongst the pantheon) allow the reader to integrate with the characters' viewpoints. In fact, the greatest parapraxis, the greatest error, is the unfinished act of love between Robbie and Cecilia; this psychological hook compels the reader to wish their love consummated; our frustration grows when we learn that they met but never made love. This, indeed, is why we dislike Bryony so intensely at the end of Book One; she has not only interrupted a sexual experience in which we have a vested interest, but she has sullied the life of a near-perfect male character whose perfection will be assured with the completion of his love.

None of this will be in the film. In fact, the only bit I expect them to pull off is Robbie's ultra-pathetic return with lost boys in tow. As a reader, I knew that was going to happen AS SOON AS the accusation was made.

I read Atonement about a month ago whilst holidaying in Cyprus, and my analysis of it stems not from A-level buit from my studies of Freud last year. I believe Robbie actually mentions Freud in the novel; a clue, perhaps, that McEwan himself is well-versed in Writing And The Unconscious. I'm studying post-1979 literature for my finals; I immediately wanted to write an essay on the novel's use of parapraxes, but then I discovered it had been filmed, and realised that addressing the now-tainted book would draw the deep disdain of all my professors."

More on that McEwan thread I linked above. The keystone, from a male perspective at least, is that we ALL wish we'd made Robbie's letter-exchange-error, and from then on we're living, through him, some kind of idealised life, which is shockingly EVAPORATED before our helpless eyes.

(oh, and the unfinished love-scene, obv.)

fucking students! jeez. (JOEK)

what is parapraxis please?

Greek island?

heh, a parapraxis is an unwitting mistake that divulges psychological information about the perpetrator. in other terms, a freudian slip.

it calls the entire fictional process into account with its astonishing closing page. It ought to have been filmed by Michael Winterbottom or something

verily, the first director ever to have messed with the fictional process.

I was giving an obvious example to a layman.

(a FELLOW layman, I ought to have said)

Stop digging now

hey, if you've got a problem with my analysis, come up with a counter-example!

The ending of the book is competely obvious!

but maybe that's what you meant above when you said you realized your far flung theory was the generally accepted take

I was giving an obvious example to a layman.

-- Just got offed, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:17 (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(a FELLOW layman, I ought to have said)

-- Just got offed, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:18 (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

PARAPRAXIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I sense a meme in the making.

It's going to be a couple of weeks before I can see this film, although I'm looking forward to it hugely. Hopefully the thread will be all J@ggered out by then and ppl will be talking a little more sensibly.

Is this the reward for trying to make sense of a confounding piece of literature?

When you say that the end of the book is completely obvious, akm, you have a point, in that the 'reunion' scene with her older sister is SO artificial and 'obvious' in feel that you can almost smell a rat even then. Everything goes exactly as you might have planned, and you can sense a stagey acting out of written roles; it's hyper-real and therefore unreal. Also, the real writer, McEwan, has been slipping in hints throughout that he's in control, and that he can do more or less as he wants, even if it does sink the reader's hopes.

Back to the film, though: I'm sure I'll really like it, and I'm sure it'll hold fairly close to my vision of the novel.

i didnt like the book.
will i like the movie?

zeno, you hate cardiacs AND atonement, i'm beginning to notice a pattern. you're the anti-me!

i hate cardicacs. atonament i just don't like.
and if im the anti-you, we might get along as statistic shows...

the statistic being http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbknGnZXHUk

I read the novel, thought it was an OK tearjerker, can't quite understand what is supposed to make it into such a masterpiece, and can't recall what was so "astonishing" about the last page... surely not all that "the protagonist is the real author" stuff? I can't see what's so revolutionary about that, even Agatha Christie probably did that...

the first half was very good - the 2nd half too try and one-dimensional, and the ending overrated,yeah

Yep, think I'd go along with that.

nonononononono, you're meant to have worked out that the protagonist is the real author miles beforehand. what the last page does is affirm McEwan's control, and it does it through its flippant dismissal of our emotional manipulation.

i read it only because Updike recommended it, and i was going blind after the review. i love Updike, what can i do.

xpost
Must have passed me by. I'll have another look at the last page, if I still have the book.

I'll read the last page if I don't have to read the rest of the book

it's a shame you have to waste so much time and pages for that last "wow" one, if it's a "wow" that is..

If you read the novel again, just keep thinking "What is the author trying to make me feel?" It's seductively simple to read the novel passively, to be swept along indulgently, and to be caught unawares by the 'tearjerking', but actually (in retrospect) perfectly logical ending.

Those pages aren't wasted, btw.

Also, has it not occurred to many people that Bryony's 'atonement' is achieved through (deliberately) having every single warm-blooded reader loathe her guts for a good three-quarters of the length? It's 'her' portrayal, although ultimately McEwan is the one who elicits both our hopes and our hatred.

took to my notice, but still,i'd cut at least half of the war part.

The rejection letter Bryony gets from the publisher is hilariously off the mark though. I guess McEwan never gets rejected so he doesn't realise they're one-sentence photocopied form letters rather than pages-long literary analysis.

The rejection letter Bryony gets from the publisher is hilariously off the mark though. I guess McEwan never gets rejected so he doesn't realise they're one-sentence photocopied form letters rather than pages-long literary analysis.

-- Zelda Zonk, Thursday, September 13, 2007 4:53 PM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

it's supposed to be from cyril connolly at 'horizon' -- he wasn't a hack editor, he probably *did* write verbose letters back. especially, i would say, to young women.

I like the war part; it's a successful exercise in stringing out our tension, in deliciously packing in detail after agonising detail in order to delay our knowledge of whether Robbie made it. If you thought it was too long, it probably did its job! :D

though i think mcewan gets some details wrong there. in the war connolly (eton and balliol) was all about social realism -- with flair, but still.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this thread about a film that Louis hasn't seen yet?

I've been elaborately setting myself up for the 'told you so'!

I've pretty much seen it, anyway; the novel is very easy to picture. If the film varies significantly from my vision, I'll be shocked.

Why don't you just go and see it ffs!

I've pretty much seen it, anyway

Louis, you haven't see it

OK, no more posts from me here until I've seen the movie. Deal.

The script was good and the film looked great, but none of the performances were great. Keira Knightley was the best of a pretty average and forgettable bunch.

SPOILER:
It looked great, but the ending made me livid. I realise they had to attempt what the book carries off, but they did it at the wrong point, and compounded it by then trying to move back "into" the story seconds later. At that point, I was watching James McAvoy and Keira Knightley cut about on a beach, not their characters, and it left a sour taste.

I quite like that Louis is so confident the film will be the same. I have never seen a film that so closely mirrored the way I remember the book, especially in the opening country-house section. It was *exactly* how I imagined it. The Dunkirk arrival too, though overall the war section didn't really work well for me in the film. And I didn't like/get the final part in the novel, or the film. Happy endings, wha?

Saoirse Ronan/Romola Garai terrific as Briony.

"I remember the book, especially in the opening country-house section. It was *exactly* how I imagined it."

This is very true, but for me I think that's my own lazy imagination. Country villas is country villas.

No, I don't think so! It was something exact about the feeling of it, and it extended to the stuff down by the river too. It just seemed uncanny to me.

I like this review of Atonement (book not film) by Christopher Priest (from http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk):

"This is an example of modern metafiction: the book you are reading and physically holding in your hands, the one written by the author named on the cover, turns out at the end to have been 'written' by one of the characters named in the novel. Why should anyone do this? Well, it's all a bit close to home, as those who take an interest in such things might already have noticed.

It seems to me that the point of a novel within a novel, or a narrative within a narrative, is that the story becomes framed by the reader's expectations. By putting what appears to be the 'hot' narrative of a real novel inside the 'cooler' context of a frame, making it into a told story or a found account, the author (i.e. the real one, named on the cover) is distancing the reader from the subject matter, an invitation to think while reading. This is different from the 'frame' often found in 19th century fiction: an after-dinner story in a London club, an old salt's yarn in a quay-side bar, a message found in a bottle, and so on. A modern frame is used instead for discourse. To take the most obvious example (the one trivialized by conservative critics to try to undermine the larger concept of metafiction), it can discuss the nature of fiction itself. Beyond that, the perception of reality may be questioned through metafictional devices. Also, memory or truth or social assumptions can be challenged. The question of identity can be raised. The reader's assumptions may be undermined. As a literary device metafiction lends itself to many superb extra opportunities for the writer who is prepared to take a chance or two: for example the text might become unreliable, or incomplete, or deniable by other characters. It's a powerful and compelling technique.

What is interesting about Atonement is that McEwan, whose literary structures have always been conservative and risk-free, should have belatedly started exploring this valuable material -- what is not all that interesting is the use to which he puts it.

At the end of Atonement it turns out that most of the book we have been reading was written by one of the characters, to 'atone' for a guilty act in childhood (described, of course, as we go along). In fact, if you read the book closely, you realize that it is not an atonement at all, but a narrative written under the awareness of the writer's imminent death, a few last words before it's too late. The contrivance McEwan comes up with is that had the story (i.e. the novel we have just read) been told earlier, then the two people directly involved would have sued for defamation, and most likely would have won. That's not my idea of an expiation of guilt.

The first part of the story concerns a weekend party in a large country house in 1935. The wealthy middle-class owners, their extended family and their friends, have unoriginal worries and plans and concerns and illnesses and erotic involvements. People misunderstand each other, but not for any unusual reason, they lie in darkened rooms with migraine, they accidentally break valuable objets d'art. Meanwhile, sexual activity takes place in the corner of the library, rape is committed in the bushes in the extensive grounds, childish frustrations are diverted into guilty acts.

Part Two is set in northern France five years later, in the days leading up to the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk. The central character in this section of the novel is the young man traduced in Part One, after he has completed his prison term for the rape he did not commit. Already wounded in action, he is bearing a serious injury that might or might not lead to his death.

Part Three is still in 1940 and concerns the two sisters at the centre of the original miscarriage of justice -- they are both now nurses, working at St Thomas's Hospital in the centre of London. As the casualties from Dunkirk start arriving the sisters are caught up in the horrors of war. The injured man from Part Two turns up in London, apparently recovered from his wounds, and there is a sort of reconciliation between the three.

The final part is a short coda: the child who was at the centre of the 1935 scandal is in the present day an elderly and famous author, and in this coda we learn why she wants to write the novel we have, as it were, just read.

Atonement is 'well written' throughout. It goes at a stately pace, with many delays for loving and detailed descriptions, all done rather well. It does not seem to be a novel that should be read for plot (although the point about metafiction, in this novel as elsewhere, is that the plot becomes of immense importance). A good literary style is the main strength of McEwan's writing in general and of this book in particular. But inescapably, because of his metafictional plan, he is creating a plot set-up and it is here he is weakest. The events which seemed trivial and over-familiar while you were reading them – but on which you suspended harsher judgment until you found out what McEwan was intending to do – gain little by the revelation at the end.

The long opening sequence, which actually takes up half of the whole thing, still reads like the scenario for a middlebrow TV drama, the kind of family saga written by Mary Wesley, Elizabeth Jane Howard or Rosamund Pilcher. The Dunkirk section is again well done on a line by line basis, but the relevance of it is a bit vague. There's nothing new to learn about Dunkirk, for instance, and the extra insights we get into the central character are small and uninteresting. If you've read WW2 novels here's another one, with a long chunk that reads like all the ones you know already, with only a fine style to commend it. The question of the young man's death (or avoidance of death) is not described in any definitive way. The book itself comes dramatically alive with the scenes set in the hospital, but again their relevance to the overall story is incidental. Towards the end of Part Three the confrontation between the three main characters starts making sense of the metafictional structure, but by this time we are more than three hundred pages into a long novel (with no inkling until now that what we have been reading is not exactly what we have been reading).

In fact, when you know how the book turns out, and you cast your mind back over some of the incidents, you realize it hadn't been like that at all. There are few internal clues: most of the book reads like a McEwan novel, the sudden attribution at the end being an unexpected switch, a distancing of the author from his own efforts. In other words, rather than bringing the reader into the metafiction, McEwan expels himself from it. You can't help wondering if the switch might have been an afterthought to try and make something of his prosaic material, a sudden loss of nerve at the end.

I bought and read Atonement for two reasons: I had admired McEwan's last serious novel, Enduring Love, and this new one received almost universally favourable reviews. I thought it would be worth reading and to a large extent it was. But all the way through I could not get out of my mind the thought that general literary writers working in Britain today, the authors of 'mainstream' novels, are a bit strapped for serious or original material. If you have any doubt about this, the novels of highly praised writers like Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro or Julian Barnes will reveal the shallowness and banality of their concerns (e.g., darts playing, butlers, love stories, respectively). These days, only some science fiction and (as Philip Pullman has pointed out) the serious end of children's literature seem able to take on real themes, subjects that challenge the readers. When you recognize the technical skill with which McEwan writes, it underlines the thinness of his subject matter, the imaginative range available to him that he either chose to ignore or didn't realize was there.

It is in short an ultimately disappointing book, a gutless novel, one that is dragged down by conservative and unimaginative material, but also one that is frustrating. Because of his stylistic ability, his general seriousness of intent, you are reminded all the way through what McEwan might be capable of producing, and which in Enduring Love, far and away his best novel, he once did."

I think Priest makes some interesting points about contemporary "literary" fiction - although I don't agree that "Enduring Love" is McEwen's best work. For me, it's "Cement Garden".

love stories, darts, and butlers are shallow and banal?

Christopher Priest doesn't read fiction then.

Falling in love with a butler with a dart through his chest might not be fictional.

Enduring Love has the worst ending of any good book that i have read. i haven't read Atonement but i did like the film a great deal. it's slightly too stylish at times but you realise why it's like that at the end. it's clever.

So Louis still hasn't seen it yet

I bet there are going to be nore pre-release posts on the novel here than posts actually discussing the film.

Haven't read the book. However the film isn't terrible. It's just really really dull. If anything James McAvoy is even worse than Keira Knightly in this.

i found it the opposite of dull. i got quite carried away with it.

My main problem with Atonement was that I found Keira a bit scrawny to be spending so much of the film in a backless dress. Slender is good; sinewy is not.

sinewy skeletal

I think I could just about overlook the scrawny back meself.

she does need a decent hotpot, fo sho. the pretty face remains regardless, barracuda jaw an' all.

2 clues..

1. James Macevoy character says "you won't hear a peep from me" is the last thing he says, too much a 'famous last words' line really

2. His character is in the flat and way too healthy for someone back from the war.

I am about 100 pages into the book, and man, this is a looooong first day. More goddamn country-house description, plz no.

Don't you like the way the kids think?

not particularly.

I remember it being an impressive evocation of the world of children. It really took me back.

The book gets better.

The world of children is a place I can visit for maybe an hour or ten pages, tops. The little buggers and their rich parents chased me out of Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Hey, just finished reading Atonement, was floored by it, was overcome, overwhelmed, wrecked by all of it -- the last three paragraphs in particular. My little problem, though, is McEwan's male point of view. In the library love scene (where he internalizes Robbie's effort at resisting sexual climax) and the dinner afterwards (where it's Robbie who also internalizes his lust for Cecilia) he is deeply invested in the male's thoughts, sexuality, psychology. As elsewhere, as well. Which doesn't work ultimately if we are to believe, in the end, that we are reading a book by "Briony Tallis." I forgive McEwan this indulgence because as a work of metafiction it is totally interpretive -- I'm sure he was conscious of the male perspective and kept it anyway. But I do think it's one area in which his bold final stroke, the coda, deservedly can be seen, in Chris Priest's analysis, as a meaningless stunt.

Why is this not out in Boston yet?!

A.O. Scott (he's totally wrong about the novel, which does not "immediately" pull you in):

Two characters make significant use of a typewriter — one is an aspiring playwright, the other a yearning rural swain — but the sound of the machine is co-opted by Dario Marianelli, who wrote the movie’s score and who conjoins the clack-clacking of mechanical composition with the steady plink of a repeated piano note. At a climactic moment Brenda Blethyn, who can be as subtle an actress as Mr. Marianelli is a composer, leaps screaming from the darkness and begins beating on the hood of a car with an umbrella, a tocsin that joins the plink and the clack in a small symphony of literal-minded irrelevance.

That pretty much describes the rest of “Atonement,” piously rendered by the screenwriter Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan’s novel. This is not a bad literary adaptation; it is too handsomely shot and Britishly acted to warrant such strong condemnation. “Atonement” is, instead, an almost classical example of how pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into film can be. The respect that Mr. Wright and Mr. Hampton show to Mr. McEwan is no doubt gratifying to him, but it is fatal to their own project.

I'm pretty violently torn on this one. I had the ending spoiled for me inadvertently (didn't read the book and I suppose that's part of the reason I'm not dismissing this one out of hand) and still that interruptus seven minutes from the end gave me a massive hiccup.

I love that it all develops from my favorite word in the English language.

And what is the deal with these Oscar-bait roles knocking me on my ass this year? First Amy Ryan, then Hal Holbrook. Now Vanessa Redgrave. I am turning into Rex Reed.

Please try to delay the complete transformation as long as possible.

Gonna try to hit this tomorrow morning, maybe.

I love that it all develops from my favorite word in the English language.

I think what you're turning into is a Brit!

...it is too handsomely shot and Britishly acted...

haha

It's going to be hard for me to be very disappointed in this as long as there are several shots like this...

http://www.workingtitlefilms.com/photos/news/176/JMA-350.jpg

stet OTM way above on how Joe Wright botches the ending.

The film is NOT LONG ENOUGH (that is, if it was good, it wouldn't be). All that was special in the novel's French sequence is gone, and what we get in its place is a showoffy pointless single-take Children of Men "topper."

McAvoy looks great in olive, and undershirts.

When you say that the end of the book is completely obvious, akm, you have a point, in that the 'reunion' scene with her older sister is SO artificial and 'obvious' in feel that you can almost smell a rat even then.

Worse clue in the film: clacking of typewriter.

Keira Knightley's character really has little to do but simmer and be an open wound. The role of Nurse Briony is even more thankless.

As in the book, the build-up to 'the incident' is very well orchestrated, if immensely contrived. After that, as in the book, the story doesn't really know what to do with itself. It's all very handsomely made, though. Keira Knightley's pointyness is most distracting.

Wright may have botched the ending, but Redgrave doesn't.

yes, Vanessa does all she can, as Armond says, to "pick this high-priced twaddle out of the Anthony Minghella gutter." (I wonder if AW knows that's Minghella interviewing Briony.)

That was the biggest C-U-N-T on a movie screen since Speed Levitch.

Yeah, I am sure Ed and I will unpack this film's use of that certain word at great length over the next month.

I saw this with an oldish (obv) audience on the Upper West Side, and some woman a few rows back did the tsk-tsk tongue-on-teeth clicking thing whenever something unfortunate happened. It was like a duet with Briony's typewriter.

^ladies like that would be a blast to watch Salo with^

i found this movie a little difficult to sit through. i have not read the book, but from writings upthread, i imagine this adaptation does not do it any justice.

OK, no more posts from me here until I've seen the movie. Deal.

-- Just got offed, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:03 (3 months ago) Bookmark Link

Spread the word! We're safe in here!

I would love to see a MAD parody.

I think Atonement brings up an important and urgent subject, something we often hear about in court cases namely: Can you trust kids? Without even realising the complexity of that issue, the film is on the opposite side of the child. Briony is, all by herself, supposed to be blamed för an adult worlds fucked up attitude towards sex and the inability to take kids seriously. There isn't a more obvious way to show how children are sacrificed because adults are acting like idiots. Atonement sentences the child to a lifelong punishment for having to - against her better judgement - pointed out an innocent man and let Briony carry the shame til her death. I mean, hasn't anyone else found this to be disgusting? Is it any different in the book?

typewriter music was annoying.

I saw this with an oldish (obv) audience on the Upper West Side, and some woman a few rows back did the tsk-tsk tongue-on-teeth clicking thing whenever something unfortunate happened.

^^same thing happened to me. Except I was in Brisbane.

i haven't seen the movie but in the book briony is overcome with shame and constructs a weird lit-alt-reality to compensate.

and briony is an annoying bitch, i don't care her age

Briony's guilt/suffering seems meant to be seen as tragic, if not particularly easy to empathize with or on the scale of the lovers' fate.

(Of course, if it had all only happened 50 years later, there would be few 13-year-olds in the Western world who wouldn't know what was up in the library. But then they wouldn't hafta shag there etc.)

I think it's more subtle than her having no idea what they were doing in the library. It's that she's not ready to deal with sexuality, especially female sexuality, and so sublimates her confused and jealous feelings into the "Robbie is a sex maniac" line.

On a similar note, though, my mum expressed incredulity that a girl of Briony's age and background in the 1930s would recognise the c-word at all.

One as intellectually curious as Briony probably would've come across it.

in Chaucer!

Lovelace: I don't understand what you're saying at all. How are adults to blame for what Briony did? If you're saying she should have been taken more seriously, well how would that have helped? Alba's right and she just wasn't mature enough to deal with it. It works because she's a believable character - if you want her to be a metaphor for sacrificed innocence instead, well that would have made for a rubbish story.

I enjoyed the first section of the book -- Alba OTM on McEwan being great at describing the way kids think -- but isn't the "twist" at the end just an old hat, Roald Dahl-ish, Tales-Of-The-Unexpected-style "twist in the tale"? Didn't Richard Matheson et al do this kind of meta-ending to death in the 50s and 60s? Aren't we only bowled over it because it's a work of "literary" fiction. I mean, isn't it basically just Anthony Powell does "Duck Amuck"?

typewriter music was annoying.

yep. I thought it was a cute gimmick for the opening sequence, but then it carried on for the entire. fucking. movie.

I didn't think this was very special at all.

i'm generally fuck-the-haters on this one. not read the book. it got a little bit tricksy at the end.

maybe it would have been better as a straightforward melodrama without the big meta conceit, though still told from briony's pov.

i got confused by the bit with the french dude: was that stuff all "true" (i.e. he and briony had met)?

NO and NO

k

good call re the french dude, that's the one bit i never really got.

i knew vaguely about the "twist" so throughout i was sort of reading it that way -- everything after the country house anyway. i figured he was meant to stand for robbie in some way. but because i more than half-expected robbie himself to turn up at the hospital with his wound, it threw me a bit.

her (cliched) scene with the french dude was her first stab at ameliorating reality with a bit of fiction. not subtle, but the scene works ok on its own. The confession/non-confession at the older girl's apartment was a bit too subtle for me, or maybe i wasn't paying attention enough. the sound was bad in the theater too, i think i liked it enough to rent it someday and see what they were on about exactly.

I confess I'm more inclined to take the melodrama on its face rather than stepping back to look at the film's thematic ambitions. Its handling of the 'meta' stuff is more ambivalent, less subtle, and ultimately less effective than Pan's Labyrinth's exploration of the same conceit, more or less so I'm taking the more charitable route and resolving to just enjoy the show. I like me some Keira Knightley.

taken on its face, it'd be more popular

however that's a bit like saying Jonathan Pryce really does escape at the end of Brazil.

well I don't mean ignoring what happens per se, just not letting its success or failure hinge upon it. for me personally. i actually favor the pollyannish, transcendent reading of Pan's and Brazil(and many other films, prob.) but not this one, which is probably the proof in the pudding in my heart of hearts.

i think the scene where she visits cecilia and robbie's there is really well done -- it's 'off', you can tell it's an imaginary conversation. i think they overcomplicate the flashback structure at that point, however: the idea he has survived dunkirk isn't clear enough at that point.

hm/whoa/hm. this was so heavily dramatic it almost made me laugh but for the horrible simple truth of how life can turn on a dime good or bad.

that's the interesting part. fiction vs reality stuff here wasn't the thing that compelled me, i guess, whereas the theme of heaviness/lightness of life could have offered something deeper and surprising - and sort of did in places. also, war, holy fucking shit it blows my mind. i'm v glad this wasn't ultimately a love story. though maybe it was.

christ, this was one of the most annoying books i have ever read, with one of the most irritating, cheap-feeling denouements. i rarely feel as though time spent reading is time wasted, but after finishing this i felt i'd been robbed.

Keira Knightley's character really has little to do but simmer and be an open wound.

-- Dr Morbius, Monday, 7 January 2008 16:26 (1 month ago) Link

well, that's got to be a good thing since the woman has approximately three facial expressions, four at a push. why is she everywhere all the time? she is a dreadful actress! she was fine in the hole and bend it like beckham, where subtlety or nuance were not only unnecessary but would have weakened the portrayal of her characters, thickly-drawn as they were, but given anything more demanding and she can single-handedly wreck an entire film. I'm happy for her to be rich and successful, i just wish she wasn't successful at something she is so utterly, utterly shit at. fuck off and be a model or a tv presenter or something.

does briony actually need to see the "i drink your milkshake" note?

her seeing robbie and cecilia wallbanging would be enough, wouldn't it? in conjunction with her feelings toward him and the argument she saw earlier.

on the other hand, maybe it's only robbie's unintentional directness of approach in the note that wins him the shag?

it definitely is.

it's an icebreaker.

ugggggh. ok, this was a very attractive movie to look at, great cinematography and staging of dunkirk, but can someone please tell me if the horrifc script was the fault of the screenwriters adaptation or actually an accurate transfer of the book? this will save me from making any effort to ever read McEwen if the book is to blame.

this movie was just embarrassing and terrible. oh also, the typewriter noises? fuck the guy who thought of that.

typewriter noises?
that's all i remember from this boring shit.

btw, those were OSCAR WINNING typewriter noises, ffs.

The book's better, yes.

oh also, the typewriter noises? fuck the guy who thought of that.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/object_images/535x535/10303151.jpg

"Yeah, well motherfuck you and John Wayne, too!"

-- Christopher Latham Sholes

Oh,i also remember that british chick being all wet.

the book is hideous

The slackness of the second half (Dunkirk, etc.) is the movie's fault -- the book is tighter than that. But the endings are pretty similar.

typewriter noises were indeed terrible.

Book way better than film--was very disppointed in the movie after the first half. Annoying the way the main character's haircut didn't change for 60 years (but she''s 3 actresses playing the ONE WOMAN do you see, do you see?). But as I read somewhere or other, Keira Knightely really does wear that green dress.

liked both the book and the film. loved the tracking shot.

this was the worst adaptaton of a "major" novel I've seen in years.

You don't get out much (not that this was great by any stretch of the imagination.)

christ, this was one of the most annoying books i have ever read, with one of the most irritating, cheap-feeling denouements.

otm!

You don't get out much (not that this was great by any stretch of the imagination.)

If I saw more feeble adaptations like this, I might stay home forever.

Vanessa Redgrave a total class act though.