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Atonement —
I went to see Atonement with an open mind. Actually, that's not true. I went expecting a decent film. Some of the cast memebers are actors I really like. I could tell, from the previews and ads, that it had been beautifully filmed. The subject matter sounded interesting. It looked as if it would be a solid, engaging, serious drama. Instead, I found myself sitting through two hours of bad soap opera disguised as a fine film.
I have nothing agianst soap opera. In fact, I love the genre (ask me about The Young and the Restless or Knts Landing, and it's on.) What I don't like is the feeble attempts on the part of some film makers to try and hide the fact that they're producing classic soap opera material, and to present their work as somewhat better or higher or more refined than what airs on daytime television. I have nothing against a sow's ear - just don't try and convince me it's a silk purse. This is exactly what Atonement is: a somewhat tacky, inplausible, manipulative soap opera that, because it refuses to embrace what it is, and insists on trying to be something more refined, fails miserably.
In a nutshell, the movie is about a misunderstanding, followed by a lie, which results in disasterous consequences. The classic stuff of soap opera. There's doomed love. Sexual tension. Wartime heartbreak. Family strife. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But it's all treated as REFINED DRAMA. Yawn.
One of the problems with this movie is that it centers around a young man who is desperately in love with a young woman played by Keira Knightly. Unfortunately, the Keira Knightly character is so haughty, nasty, obnoxious, narcissistic and obnoxious (except for about three minutes, when she seems almost human) that I couldn't get into the spirit of rooting for them as a couple. In fact, most of the characters in this movie are completely unlikable. When the characters in a movie whose success hinges on the viewer's having an emotional stake in its outome are completely unlikable, the movie is doomed to failure. And this is why it's a mistake for a writer or director to refuse to embrace the nature of their material.
Soap operas, when they work, work because the writers are able to create characters that the audience can relate to, like, hate, feel for, care about. Even it means that you, as a viewer, love to hate a character, there's got to be some sort of real passion. There's no chance for that sort of passion to develop in Atonement, because most of the characters are just nasty and annoying, without any of the juice that makes hating them so much fun. Think back to Larry Hagman's portrayal of J.R. Ewing. Viewers loved to hate him because he was evil, but deliciously evil. He sometimes said and did things that we all secretly wish we could get away with. And he had a few qualities that made him even lovable, in some ways. The characters in Atonement behave badly just for the sake of behaving badly and, by and large, there's not enough of a balance, in terms of redeemable behavior. Keira Knightly's character is just awful for most of the film, then has about five minutes of material that's supposed to be her redmption. I didn't buy it, and I never shook off the feeling that this was the same woman who spent the entire first hour of the movie being about as abrasive and annoying as humanly possible.
In the end, I didn't really care what happened, except that I finally got to go home.
The only reason it's getting two stars, instead of one, is that it's beautifully filmed.
Atonement is not recommended by Telpher
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