Why Atone­ment remains a great mod­ern film about love and war

Ani­mal fig­urines are lined up in a row, as if they are fol­low­ing a ray of light stream­ing in from the win­dow. They are found to lead up to a giant 13-year-old Briony Tallis, her face obscured as she is furi­ous­ly typ­ing away at her desk. The stac­ca­to tap­ping of her type­writer leaks into the piano keys of Dario Marianelli’s moody score and Atone­ment begins.

Ten years on from this major adap­ta­tion of Ian McEwan’s nov­el, and with direc­tor Joe Wright revis­it­ing World War Two in his next film, Dark­est Hour, it seems as good a time as any to revis­it Atone­ment. A sto­ry of a young cou­ple torn apart by fate, war and a lit­tle girl’s mis­un­der­stand­ing. The emo­tion­al punch doesn’t come from the dev­as­tat­ing romance, the false accu­sa­tion or even the war back­drop but from the sound, or lack thereof.

The tran­si­tion at the begin­ning of the film is not just a clever piece of sound mix­ing, but a ref­er­ence point for Briony’s rest­less­ly imag­i­na­tive char­ac­ter. Wright con­veys the nar­ra­tive not through dia­logue, not through the act­ing but through the sound­track. When­ev­er we hear the type­writer through the rest of the film, we know it means Briony. It means her lies.

Guiller­mo Del Toro once insight­ful­ly observed that, ​“the look of a movie is a table of four legs. One is of course cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but the oth­er three are wardrobe, set pro­duc­tion design and direc­tion.” Con­tin­u­ing this inspired line of thought, it’s fair to say that the emo­tion in a movie stands on act­ing, music, edit­ing and dia­logue. When one fal­ters, the emo­tion­al impact is dimin­ished. Wright seam­less­ly ties in all of these ele­ments to con­tribute to the emo­tion­al arc at the fore­front of every frame.

A per­fect exam­ple of this is the scene in which Rob­bie (James McAvoy) realis­es he gave Briony (Saoirse Ronan) the wrong note to pass on to Cecelia (Keira Knight­ley), hand­ing over an anatom­i­cal­ly indul­gent ver­sion rather than the for­mal one intend­ed. Wright states on the director’s com­men­tary that, ​“one of film’s great­est assets is its poten­tial for rhythm.” Rhythm not only estab­lished by the sound, but its coop­er­a­tion with edit­ing and movement.

When Rob­bie first calls to Briony from the dis­tance, Wright leaves us wait­ing in real-time for her to reach him and before he pass­es over the fatal let­ter. This long pause is then coun­ter­act­ed by the speed in which she runs away with it, and the famil­iar­ly rapid stac­ca­to notes begin to play. Through the music Wright is warn­ing us that a piv­otal point in the film is com­ing up. We are remind­ed of the girl’s rest­less imag­i­na­tion and the fore­bod­ing dan­ger of col­lid­ing it with some­thing so adult as an erot­ic love letter.

And so, the unfor­tu­nate series of events lead­ing to the sep­a­ra­tion of Rob­bie and Cecelia are put into place. All stem­ming from a ​“fan­ci­ful” girl not under­stand­ing what she sees. We begin to hate the sound of the type­writer, Briony’s sta­ple sound and all it rep­re­sents. The child­ish fic­tion has become cru­el lies. Her capri­cious words are death sen­tences. In turn, we detest the premise of sto­ry­telling as a whole, and the sto­ry­teller along with it. Wright beau­ti­ful­ly manip­u­lates our emo­tions and riles them up into a fren­zy of hatred towards a lit­tle girl.

In a piv­otal scene at the very end of the film, an elder­ly Briony (Vanes­sa Red­grave) decides to final­ly tell the truth and reveal the arti­fice in her sto­ry. As opposed to the character’s intro­duc­tion, her face dom­i­nates the screen as if look­ing direct­ly at the audi­ence. While she speaks, her defin­i­tive sound is replaced by the ​‘Dénoue­ment’ track. Lit­er­al­ly mean­ing the finale, it con­sists of long, low, sor­row­ful notes in con­trast to the rapid stac­ca­to of the piano.

Briony is seek­ing atone­ment. Replac­ing her errat­ic fas­ci­na­tions with the bleak truth. The sor­row­ful sounds of her redemp­tion brings the audi­ence face to face with their accu­sa­tion as this decrepit fig­ure asks, ​“What sense of hope or sat­is­fac­tion could a read­er derive from an end­ing like that?” Now, the truth is unwel­come because it holds the trag­ic injus­tice of reality.

The inter­play of all the music with the themes of the film demon­strate a far more potent, vis­cer­al involve­ment that exer­cis­es the tools of film­mak­ing to their fullest. On a lev­el play­ing ground, the rhythm of the music, edit­ing and act­ing all coa­lesce to project the emo­tion­al impres­sion of the scene onto the audi­ence. Atone­ment is an orches­tral sym­pho­ny, with the direc­tor as the con­duc­tor string­ing all the ele­ments of film­mak­ing into a har­mo­ny of cinema.