Atonement.

"The artists who adapted Ian McEwan's devastating novel Atonement to the screen have done, by all objective measures, a sterling job of stuffing everything into their movie's two-hour frame: the major themes; the radical shifts in perspective; and the final, audacious act of narrative rug-pulling that laid me and a lot of other readers out flat, brooding both on the fates of the characters and the fatal ways in which fictions can get tangled up with lies," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The film is absorbing and evocative - more fully worked out than many other prestige literary adaptations, like Cold Mountain. It leaves you very sad for James McAvoy and Keira Knightley as the increasingly haggard lovers, and for the fanciful girl (Saoirse Ronan in 1935, Romola Garai on the other side of puberty) who alters their destiny. But it doesn't achieve what McEwan does - what all adaptations of his books need to do to make the leap to another medium. It doesn't fuck with your head."

Updated through 12/8.

For the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, there is "a general suspicion that Atonement, as a story about stories, may be too self-conscious for its own good. You have to admire it, when so much of the competition seems inane and slack, but you can't help wondering, with some impatience, what happened to its heart."

"No two-hour film could ever capture all the riches of McEwan's masterly novel," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "But [director Joe] Wright and [screenwriter Christopher] Hampton's Atonement comes tantalizingly close, while adding sensual delights all its own."

For the New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon talks with McEwan, who tells her, "Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you."

For the Los Angeles Times, Mark Salisbury meets McAvoy and Emili Vesilind profiles costume designer Jacqueline Durran.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and Toronto and in the British press.

Online listening tip. "Concerning Costume Dramas." : "This week on the IFC News podcast, we talk about the recent decline in the genre, its Merchant Ivory heyday and the costume drama hall of fame."

Updates, 12/4: "McEwan may rank with Austen as literature's leading exponent of psychological realism, but it's not his densely constructed characters or profusion of descriptive detail that have turned this most eggheaded of writers into such a hot movie property over the years," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "It's McEwan's Gothic side - his weakness for building borderline-vicarish moral introspection around a moment of flamboyant horror or black comedy - that puts his adaptations into movie theaters.... Picture the fastidiously literary McEwan at a pitch meeting, holding his nose. Then picture Wright talking the talk with his unerringly commercial radar for what will fly across the Atlantic, and you'll grasp the abyss between Atonement, the unobtrusively dark novel, and Atonement, the palatable movie."

Online viewing tip. Jerry Lentz sends along an online viewing tip. Borders interviews McEwan and Hampton.

Cole Haddon talks with McAvoy for the Boston Phoenix.

Updates, 12/5: "The first hour of the film is masterfully assembled, zipping breathlessly back and forth in time throughout the seemingly innocuous events of one languid summer's day in 1935," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "By the end of the day, Briony has done a bad, bad thing. Then suddenly we leap forward a few years into the thick of WWII, and Atonement never recovers."

This adaptation "gums up McEwan's clockwork - but, aiming to please salivating book clubs rather than the Booker Prize committee, spins a better yarn than the author," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"[U]ltimately, the movie amounts to rolling lawns, lovely costumes, and characters that simply fail to resonate," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

Atonement is "a highly derivative prestige movie that makes a fetish of McEwan's literary self-consciousness by translating it into the most fussy, pretentiously directed movie since Andrew Dominik's Jesse James/Robert Ford," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "This is worse because, at the movies, literary pretense is excessive."

Update, 12/6: "For the first hour, set in a prewar English country house, it's faultless: a pungent stew of pleasure and dread, shrill suspicions and pouting revenge," writes the Stranger's Annie Wagner. "The rest of the movie is carried by this virtuosic opening section, but it never quite kicks in a motor of its own."

In the LA CityBeat, Andy Klein draws connections between Atonement and The Go-Between, the novel by LP Hartley and Joseph Losey's adaptation: "Each takes place before a World War in a huge British country home, where a beautiful young upper-class woman is having an affair with someone considered beneath her station. In each, the plot is set in motion when one of the lovers has a child deliver a message to the other. Lives are ruined, and the child grows up to be portrayed by a Redgrave (Sir Michael in The Go-Between, daughter Vanessa in Atonement)."

As you'll have heard, Atonement "contains a bravura Steadicam shot that takes in the evacuation of Dunkirk, swooping through masses of bedraggled troops strewn across the pitted beach," notes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "Wright's version of Pride and Prejudice boasted a similar stunt shot, but while Pride's served to knit together the various factions at a society ball, Atonement's conveys little more than a sense of scale, revealing ever-greater numbers of the walking dead. It's a tour de force, but it doesn't serve the scene." Also: a talk with a few of the players.

"There's an old saw in the movie business that great novels yield mediocre movies (like The Great Gatsby) while mediocre novels can be turned into great ones (like The Godfather)," writes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. "Atonement is the rare exception, a fine novel that, with modest alterations, has been translated into a fine movie."

"If you haven't read the novel, you'll wonder if there's something missing, and there is: the sense of writing as fundamental to a sense of moral culpability and the (im)possibility of redemption," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "What's missing, in short, is the whole point of the book - that writing matters, that literature is important. The titular atonement is Briony's, and it's rendered confusingly here; she grows to be a writer, polishing her work during the Blitz, but her urgency never translates to screen."

Updates, 12/7: "This is not a bad literary adaptation; it is too handsomely shot and Britishly acted to warrant such strong condemnation," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "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."

"Wright and his screenwriter, Christopher Hampton, may not hit every note perfectly, but the picture they've come up with is full-bodied and intelligent," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Wright gets all the softness and beauty of McEwan's book, but he also stresses its steeliness: This is both a love story and a reflection on the way artists shape art to come up with a more palatable view of the world. In that way, art doesn't just help us sort out our feelings; it helps us survive them."

"Wright's sensibility, for at least the first half of his film, is blisteringly cinematic," writes Bilge Ebiri at Nerve. "This guy can use a camera, and he wants you to know it.... But this is, in reality, two different films. Possibly even three."

"Each period and scene in the movie is compelling on its own terms, and then compelling on a deeper level as a playing out of the destiny that was sealed beside the fountain on that perfect summer's day," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Wright's "ability to capture body language exceeds even his abilities not to lose a book in translation," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "[T]he headier themes don't blunt the visceral moments. The generous, sharp performances, especially Garai's, deepen the story's emotional impact, as does Wright's assured, frequently astounding direction."

"[T]his is one of the few adaptations that gives a splendid novel the film it deserves," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with McAvoy.

The "fierce protectors and pessimists may now stand down," writes the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday. "In the almost spookily capable hands of 35-year-old director Joe Wright, the film version of Atonement has achieved that to which every literary adaptation should aspire, to respect the original material while freeing it from confining reverence."

"It's a compelling story whose ironies speak of the consolations of art, among other considerable themes, but it's conventionally compelling in its telling, only occasionally (albeit strikingly) daring in its emphases (as in the scene where Robbie playfully/ardently types out his true feelings to Cecilia)," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The settings are handsome, the cinematography accomplished, the performances first-rate. Knightley's Cecilia is fetching and moving, and McAvoy imbues Robbie with a sort of good-old-fashioned leading-man charisma he hasn't shown before. Yes, it is all relatively tasteful and proper, but it does manage to stick to the ribs a bit more than most films of its ilk do."

Update, 12/8: "The central romantic tragedy, and older Briony's (Romola Garai) tortured attempts to make reparations for her crime, are dutifully depicted but missing that vital spark of thorny, fervent, wild emotion, eventually leaving Atonement a would-be epic that feels as if it were trapped under a pane of glass," writes Nick Schager.

Posted by dwhudson at December 3, 2007 9:00 AM