Imagining it all put right

Buy Atonement from Amazon.co.uk
or from Amazon.com

In the long, sultry days of summer 1935, precocious thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is writing a play to perform with her cousins who are staying in the Tallis’s country house. From her window, Briony sees an extraordinary scene by the fountain involving older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy), the son of the housekeeper and the same age as Cecilia. Well-spoken and very intelligent, Robbie has just graduated from Cambridge University where he had been funded by Mr. Tallis, and is now working as gardener for the summer. Cecilia has also graduated from Cambridge, but although she and Robbie were good friends during their childhood, she hardly spoke to him while they were students and very little over the summer. Briony watches with astonishment as Cecilia seems to have a sharp disagreement with Robbie, takes off her blouse and skirt, climbs into the fountain in her slip and plunges under the water for long moments before climbing out, putting her clothes back on and stalking off. Briony’s wild imagination interprets this incident and two others later in the day as evidence that Robbie is a dangerous sex maniac. So when she glimpses cousin Lola (Juno Temple) being sexually assaulted in the grounds that night, she immediately jumps to the conclusion that the culprit is Robbie, who is arrested and imprisoned on her evidence.

By May 1940, Robbie has been released and is fighting in northern France, attempting to reach Dunkirk to be evacuated. Cecilia has become a ward sister in London and Briony is training as a nurse, also in London. Briony has come to realise that she misunderstood everything that happened on that fateful day five years previously, and is torn with guilt and regret that she is responsible for an innocent man going to prison and that Robbie and Cecilia were denied their love for each other.

Christopher Hampton’s screenplay is a brilliant adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, and Joe Wright’s first-rate direction make this one of the most successful film adaptations of a novel I have seen. There are inevitably changes since film doesn’t work in the same way as literature, besides the difficulty of reducing a novel of this length to make it filmable. The performances of the entire cast – all absolutely ideal for their roles – are first rate. McAvoy is consistently excellent, but this was far and away Keira Knightley’s best performance, while Saoirse Ronan, Romala Garai and Vanessa Redgrave were all superb playing Briony Tallis at various stages of her life. The cinematography was stunning throughout, perfectly capturing the sultry summer days at the Tallis’s country house and beautifully evocative of wartime France and London. The scene when Robbie arrives at the chaos of Dunkirk features a fabulous single-take tracking shot around the beach lasting around five minutes. Everything is complemented perfectly by Dario Marianelli's score, which cleverly features the percussion of Briony’s typewriter keys. It is a haunting score which grows in aching melancholy, precisely capturing the emotional tone without ever becoming overwhelming or manipulative.

Like most of Ian McEwan’s work, Atonement is a penetrating examination of the inner lives of his characters. He excels at dissecting emotional anguish and mental torment, so that even if we do not share the perspective of his characters, we understand why they are like they are. In the case of Briony Tallis we don’t gain that understanding of her until late in the story, but by postponing the revelation, McEwan gives us an even deeper insight into her character than we might otherwise gain. Remorse nags at her throughout adult life, and as an old woman and successful author she publishes an autobiographical novel, Atonement, in an attempt to put things right. She confesses her failings in its pages and even more so in a television interview (the biggest change from the novel in which she reflects back on what has happened and regrets that her book cannot be published before she dies).

Central to the story is the power and danger of imagination. We live in our minds in a very real sense: imagination, memory, our analysis of the world and our interpretation of the events that impinge upon us. These are what enable us to function, to make decisions and to act. However, as McEwan potently shows, we are constantly in danger, walking on the brink of a precipice between reality and fantasy. We relate to people, not on the basis of who they really are in themselves, but on the basis of what we think they are and why we imagine they have acted in particular ways or said certain things. We witness an act and impute motivations to the people involved, yet we cannot ever know with certainty what their intentions really were. Often we’re right, or not far off, because we would act in the same way in the same situation, or because we have previous experience of the people involved. Part of growing in wisdom is the ability to discern more of what is behind the actions and words we encounter. When we do form correct assumptions about motives, we respond in appropriate ways – at least, if we are not acting out of malice. But when we are wrong, the fall-out can be catastrophic.

This is why McEwan makes Briony the focus of this story, not, as many people assume, Robbie and Cecilia. The action centres on them for sure, but that doesn’t mean the story is primarily about them. The film is bracketed by Briony the writer: first as a thirteen-year-old drafting The Trials of Arabella, and finally as the elderly novelist who is on the verge of losing her memory and rationality as a result of creeping dementia. She is, as her mother notes in the novel, ‘always off and away in her mind’, letting her inventiveness off the leash as she constructs fantasies, not just written ones for reading, but ones in her mind about real people – fantasies for living. Briony has not yet reached the point where she understands that she can ascribe entirely wrong motivations to others, that they may behave in ways that would never occur to her because they’re adults and she remains a child. As she enters adulthood herself, she gradually develops an awful clarity about how wrong she was and how she has ruined not only Robbie’s life, but Cecilia’s and, to a degree, her own.

Yet the tragedy at the heart of this story is not merely the result of youthful misapprehension. Later, we are given strong hints that there was an element of malice at work, perhaps too subtly for Briony herself to realise until later. She had previously developed a crush on Robbie and concocted a fantasy about him rescuing her from the lake in the grounds. When he confirms that he would rescue her if she were to fall in, she plunges into the water and waits for him to dive in and bear her to safety. Of course, he does so, but he is unsurprisingly furious. It seems that a lingering resentment pushed her to draw particular conclusions about Robbie when, after knowing him for her entire life, she would have been far more justified deducing something drastically more benevolent.

There is something irrational about Briony’s behaviour on the fateful summer day, but the irrationality was the wrong imaginative leap she made. Having jumped the wrong way, she proceeds rationally to expose the truth about the man she had concluded was dangerous. We can be critical of Briony, but we all do things which appear irrational to others. It’s important to realise that the irrationality is in our heads; what we then do seems to us to be reasonable – otherwise we wouldn’t do it. We may quickly realise that we’ve done the wrong thing, that we’ve been hasty or stupid or blind or irresponsible, and try to redress the problem immediately. Or we may not. The real peril of hasty conclusions comes when someone rationally, doggedly follows through the implications of a false idea, regardless of what it entails for others, rather than admitting the shakiness of the foundations and allowing others to reflect on them. We can all too easily find ourselves in a situation like Briony in which circumstances have conspired against the growing sense of needing to make some reparation, to do something, however inadequate, to make amends. Briony is a powerful reminder of the vital need to be wise in the way we judge others and to reflect carefully before acting – especially when those actions can have life-changing repercussions. As the book of Proverbs says, ‘The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception’ (Proverbs 14:8, TNIV). There is much similar wisdom to be found in Proverbs: ‘The discerning heart seeks knowledge, but the mouth of a fool feeds on folly,’ (15:14) or, ‘Foolishness brings joy to those with no sense; a sensible person stays on the right path’ (15:21).

However good our intentions are, all of us experience something of the anguish that Briony feels over having acted wrongly with serious or even devastating consequences. And all of us have, at some time or other, abandoned our good intentions and acted with a degree of malice. What can we do about it? Briony came to wish that she could do something, set matters straight even if she could not regain Robbie’s lost years. If we can make some restitution we should; if we need to change our stories in order that the truth should be known, we should. It can be extremely painful, even humiliating, but if we want to have integrity and a clear conscience, we must make some atonement. Atonement is a deeply theological word. It was invented by William Tyndale in the sixteenth century when he realised that there was no direct translation into English of the biblical concept. It includes the notion of reconciliation and also of covering – an offence is covered in order to bring about reconciliation between the culprit and the offended party. It is not enough to merely sweep the offence under the carpet; there needs to be some kind of payment which covers the cost. This is what Briony was unable to do, and so, haunted by remorse, she resorts again to her imagination – an attempt to find a way of becoming at peace with herself.

It’s not enough, though, because when we offend or wrong someone else, we also offend God. Our sense of guilt does not merely arise out of a bad conscience in relation to someone else, but in relation to God who will one day call us to account. How can we redress the problem at this level, even if we can resolve the problems we have inflicted on other humans? The biblical answer is that we can’t. But this is why Tyndale had to coin a new word: the Bible does talk about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, being an atonement for us in his death and resurrection. It has been understood in several ways, including Jesus winning the victory over Satan and death, paying a ransom to Satan to free us from his dominion and slavery to death, a healing of the relationship and, centrally, as Jesus paying the price that we cannot pay. He died the death we deserve, took the punishment that should be ours, covered the cost of our transgressions because they’re too great for us ever to be able to do so. Briony longed to make atonement, but couldn’t, not realising that it has been done for us. It still requires us to swallow our pride and to humble ourselves, because it means that we must admit that we have been on the side of folly and wishful thinking, rather than on the side of wisdom and truth. If Briony could have recognised this, she might have sought forgiveness rather than hoping to atone for her wrongdoing by inventing more stories.

Back