Venice. Atonement.

"Tonight's opening movie at the Venice Film Festival certainly features the most glamorous young talent that the British film industry has to offer," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, offering a first impression of Atonement. "Keira Knightley and James McAvoy star as the tragically sundered wartime lovers in an epic directed by Joe Wright, adapted from the bestselling novel by Ian McEwan. Could it be The English Patient for the noughties?"

Wright's next project will be The Soloist, a "fact-based drama about a violin prodigy," reports Michael Fleming for Variety. Robert Downey, Jr and Jamie Foxx are on board.

Updated through 9/4.

Earlier: Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. And then, there are the Wright interviews and profiles: David Gritten (Telegraph), Hermoine Eyre (Independent) and Jason Solomons (Observer). Screenwriter Christopher Hampton has blogged about adapting McEwan, and Jeff Dawson has spoken with Wright and Hampton for the London Times.

Updates: "Composer Dario Marianelli has created a wonderfully inventive score," blogs Ray Bennett. "Marianelli is one of several from the Pride & Prejudice team that Wright re-assembled for his screen version of the Ian McEwan novel. The composer picked up a Classical Brit award and an Academy Award nomination for his Austen score. He's worked with directors Bille August, Michael Winterbottom, Michael Caton-Jones and Terry Gilliam, and did the music for Neil Jordan's upcoming revenge thriller The Brave One starring Jodie Foster."

Atonement is "for its first half at least, a towering achievement, a compelling, richly detailed, moving examination of morals, lies, and class prejudice, beautifully acted, and strikingly shot by Seamus McGarvey," writes Mark Salisbury for Premiere. "[I]t's when the story leaps forward five years to war-ravaged France, that, for me, the film relaxed it vice-like grip, as the Brideshead Revisited/Gosford Park flavourings of the first act surrenders to the horrors of combat, with McAvoy's soldier stuck behind enemy lines, struggling to make it to Dunkirk and a boat to England.... There's such a stiff upper lip quality to much of this, one can only assume that Brief Encounter must be Wright's favourite film."

Emmanuel Burdeau, writing for Cahiers du cinéma, finds Atonement to be a "disappointment... The film is of the dreary genre, the sophisticated British melodrama."

Updates, 8/30: "Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life, but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms," writes Derek Elley for Variety:

Where Wright's debut took a relatively free hand in reworking Jane Austen's classic in more youthful terms, Atonement is immensely faithful to McEwan's novel, with whole scenes and dialogue seemingly lifted straight from the page in Christopher Hampton's brisk adaptation.

And where Pride & Prejudice took a more realistic approach to Austen's universe, Atonement consciously evokes the acting conventions and romantic cliches of 30s/40s melodramas - from the cut-glass British accents, through Dario Marianelli's romantic, kinetic score, to the starchy period look.

It's a gamble that could easily have tilted over into farce. But Wright's approach is redeemed by his cast and crew, with leads like Knightley, McAvoy and young Irish thesp Saoirse Ronan driving the movie on the performance side and technicians like DP Seamus McGarvey and designers Sarah Greenwood and Jacqueline Durran providing a richly decorated frame for their heightened playing.

"This is a textbook example of literary adaptation; breathtakingly beautiful in its craftsmanship, impeccably acted and quietly devastating in its emotional impact," writes Allan Hunter for Screen Daily. "It should also be considered the first front runner for across the board consideration among both Oscar and BAFTA voters."

"[I]t ranks with the best novel adaptations of recent times," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett.

Updates, 8/31: James Christopher finds "the buzz, Oscar and otherwise, around this world premiere of Atonement is only partially merited." Also in the London Times, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, author of Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man, talks with Julian Fane, who, in 1940, was a 19-year-old 2nd Lieutenant in the Gloucestershire Regiment and whose experiences are echoed in McAvoy's character.

Geoffrey Macnab profiles Knightley for the Independent.

Update, 9/1: Online listening tip. John Mullan profiles McEwan for the BBC. Via the Literary Saloon.

Update, 9/4: For Time Out's Dave Calhoun, Atonement is a "noble, well-made, superbly performed and photographed (by Seamus McGarvey) semi-failure then, but still one that shows Wright to be one of the more imaginative filmmakers of his generation, capable of winning over large audiences with daring endeavours."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at August 29, 2007 2:04 AM