Atonement came with some pretty positive reviews from people who oughta know, including some of the 'even better than the book' variety (having not been overly enamoured of the book when I read it some time back, this impressed me less than it might otherwise have, but even so...), and I can see what all the fuss was about, though I don't think it's by any stretch a great movie.
What it is, is a great-looking film - both in its lavishly wrought details (locations and costuming especially) and in its stunning set pieces (fountain, library, Dunkirk), it's nothing short of sumptuous. It's also a film that, to a very large extent, succeeds in having its cake and eating it: it mostly convinces as a melodrama, with the attendant emotional heft, and also mostly succeeds in conveying its several messages about responsibility, regret, imagination and 'atonement' (the conveying of which necessarily depends in part on the undermining of those emotional effects, admittedly while reinforcing them in a different way); likewise, Knightley and McAvoy look the part and, whether through good acting or the fortuity of having well-cast actors (or, more likely, a bit of both), put in performances serving both of those impulses within the film, walking a fine line between genuine expressiveness and a more distant inscrutability or unknowability. (All of the actors who play Briony at the several stages of her life are very good, too, particularly the first two, Saoirse Ronan and Romola Garai, with Vanessa Redgrave having less to do than either of the others.) If, in the end, it doesn't quite succeed in reconciling those two threads, then the failure, such as it is, is, I suspect, an unavoidable one in large measure.
