Feature for Atonement

It’s Not Always Fair in Love and War By Albertina Lloyd

‘Atonement’ is a powerful story of love and secrets, set to capture its audience’s hearts and imagination. It is both glamorously old fashioned in style and refreshingly modern in the themes it deals with.

Director Joe Wright admits it was a challenge to do justice to ‘Atonement’ - already a highly acclaimed novel by award-winning writer Ian McEwan – on the big screen.

Joe said: “I did see making such a critically acclaimed novel into a film as daunting.

“There’s this weird thing that people say, that good books make bad films and bad books make great films and I had that paranoia running round the back of my mind.

“But I don’t have much choice. When a piece of material gets its claws into me I’m totally at its mercy and I have no choice but to do it and that’s how it was with McEwan’s spectacular novel.

“It just got under my skin and all those concerns just had to be dealt with.

“A lot of adaptors have this catch phrase ‘Of course at some point you have throw the book away’ and I always used to nod my head and pretend to understand what they meant.

“But I think you only throw the book away if it’s rubbish and so we never did that. We kept the book by our sides throughout the whole process.”

While the film stars award-winning actors James McAvoy and Keira Knightley as the tragic lovers, Cecelia Tallis and Robbie Turner, it is the part of the young Bryony Tallis – played by 12-year-old newcomer Saoirse Ronan – who propels the plot and steals the show.

Bryony is an aspiring writer with a wild imagination, whose naïve actions lead to dire consequences when she sees something she shouldn’t have and jumps to conclusions.

Irish schoolgirl Saoirse was discovered after a long search for the perfect Bryony and shines brightly as an incredible talent among the star-studded cast list.

Joe said: “Usually when you have a child play a version of the same character you get the adult actor first and then get a child who can act and looks like the adult. We did it the other way round. We hunted for a Bryony that could act and it’s amazingly difficult to find kids who can act.

“But Saoirse is the clearest example of the acting gene that I’ve ever come across. She just can do it and it’s really weird.

“Really, it’s strange. You work with actors like Keira and James and you think they weren’t just born that good, they’ve learnt and they’ve trained.

“And then you meet someone like Saoirse and she hasn’t trained and this is what talent is. And maybe James and Keira were also like that too, I don’t know but she was extraordinary.”

Young Juno Temple who plays Bryony’s manipulative cousin Lola and recently appeared in ‘Notes On A Scandal’ also gives an impressive performance.

Bryony’s testament to what she has witnessed leads to Cecelia and Robbie being torn apart on the very day that they have finally realised they are passionately in love.

The rest of the film sees the two lovers’ desperate yearning to be reunited, and an older, wiser and regretful Bryony – played brilliantly by Romala Garai – attempting to help them.

Set in upper class 1930s England the love between Cecelia and Robbie is unspoken. They feel an uncontrollable passion for each other and yet the stiff-upper-lip mentality of the day prevents them from pouring their hearts and feelings out.

They first confess their feelings for each other during a highly charged erotic love scene, when they consummate their relationship in the throws of passion against a bookcase.

The scene is sizzling with eroticism, and while you see only two fully dressed people in a silent embrace, the mood conveys it all.

Since so much hinges on this one scene – as the young couple go on to wait for each other for four years all because of their one night of passion – director Joe wanted to get it exactly right, and so instructed Keira and Robbie of their every movement.

Joe said: “It’s choreography. Like when you choreograph a piece of dance - it all needs to be really precise to express that feeling.

“Because if you just go ‘OK, now make out against the bookshelf’ then nothing would happen.

“And it was a laugh.”

James adds: “It can be like car chases, I think.

“Actually, it’s quite liberating to have a director stand behind the camera and say ‘Do this now, and now do this.’

“It sounds a bit sordid but it liberates an actor, I think. Because Joe left us in no uncertain terms of knowing what we were trying to accomplish and what would be good and we really knew that we had to do.

“In a loves scene that’s really, really advantageous, because you don’t have that horrible moment of ‘We don’t really know what this scene is we just know we snog and we’ve got to shag.’

“Actually you think ‘Oh for f**k sakes I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to feel like this, we’ve not even talked much and she’s going to think I’ve a got a small…’

“But with this one it was to the point that even talking about it after we engaged in it -and even during the scene sometimes - you felt liberated, and because we both gave up our trust to Joe, and that helped us.”

As a spiral of events lead to Robbie being sent to prison, he and Cecelia do not meet again until a brief encounter in a London tea room four year afterwards – in the height of World War II when he is about to be sent to fight on the French frontline.

Again, this is a scene where all the passion and emotion bubbles below the surface.

In a homage to one of Britain’s most classic love dramas, David Lean’s ‘Brief Encounter’, Keira and James play out a moving reunion in which they are desperate to talk of love and desire, but bound by formality simply pour each other tea and promise to wait for one another.

James said: “The Swallow tea room scene was utterly, utterly heartbreaking. It was my favourite scene. To read it to watch it and to do it. To play what I love to play, which is inner conflict.

“To have that ultimate conflict when all you want to do is say that you love somebody but if you do then your heart will die. If you let it out your heart will break.”

Keira explained: “To prepare Joe got us to watch a lot of David Lean movies, ‘In Which We Serve’ and also ‘Brief Encounter’.

“And I really enjoyed looking at Celia Johnson, because she had this incredible ability to not say what she’s feeling but you know exactly what’s going on.

“I think it’s a really exciting thing that it’s everything that’s not said that’s important. It really added to the entire tension.

“The fact that these people aren’t able to be like we are today and say ‘This is exactly what’s going on. This is what the problem is,’ and socially they can’t do that and so you get this inner conflict and it’s all bubbling beneath the surface.

“I actually found it quite liberating. It was more enjoyable to keep it all in. It was an amazing experience.”

Joe believes this restraint is more powerful than any confession of love could ever be.

He said: “So much has come from America since that time, including the way that after a sentence we leave our mouths open.

“We’re all like slack-jawed American cowboys. It’s a horrible thing to do. No one shuts their mouths anymore. It’s something we have to remind ourselves about.

“It’s fascinating to think about what changes have occurred over the past 60 year. I don’t know about all this American ‘We’ve got to talk about our emotions all the time.’ I don’t know if it really works.”

Just as McEwan’s book is divided into three parts, so is the film.

After the fairytale drama in the Victorian manor house, seen through the eyes of young Bryony, we move to the devastation of war.

Robbie and two other British Privates - one of whom is Private Tommy Nettles, played by young British actor Danny Mays – are making their way across war-torn Northern France to Dunkirk.

For all the men – who are injured and broken-spirited by Britain’s retreat - it is a matter of survival, but for Robbie he is making his way back, not just to safety but to Cecelia, so that they might finally realise their dream of being together.

Joe was constricted by time, location and budget.

He revealed: “In the book, during the part set in France you’ve got these Stuka plane attacks and you’ve hundreds of thousands of refugees on the roads and you have people being shot and it’s this whole epic journey.

“So one day I went to the producer and I said we need another four million dollars to realise the whole walk to Dunkirk sequence properly.

“And he, bless him, said ‘I won’t give you a dollar over 30 to make an art film.’ ”

The French scenes were all filmed in Britain and for the beach scene they only had the 1,600 extras for one day, and Joe wanted it all filmed at sunset, so they took a gamble.

He explained: “I put all our resources, what resources we did have, into the beach shot at Dunkirk.

“The budget was very low, so we put all our resources onto that beach and I thought, ‘I’ve only got one day with these thousands of extras, how to I use them to the best effect?’

“So one day, almost as a joke I came in and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we did one long steady cam shot, and everyone laughed, but that amused me so I did it again and the joke turned into something dauntingly real.

“And I was very interested in capturing the light and I had a faith that at a certain point we were going to get really good light that day and I’d almost chosen a location because of the direction of the alight at evening.

“I wanted a magical elegiac feeling. It’s a scene about wastefulness. The waste of human life, of animals’ life, of machines, of industry, even Bibles are being thrown on the fire so the Germans can’t use them. And I wanted that magic out of light.

“So we rehearsed all day from six o’clock in the morning and at six o’clock in the evening we started shooting and we did three takes and on the third take the light was with us. It was magical.

“It was terrifying, though, because the recording devices were set up such a long way from the camera we didn’t actually have a record of what we’d shot.

“So we were all just kind of looking at each other going ‘Did we get it?’

“So I went for a fourth take but the steady cam operator collapsed, so time was up!”

James adds: “We arrived at six in the morning and rehearsed forever. But it didn’t feel like we rehearsed forever, it was actually just enough because we had 1,000 people and we had all those people to coordinate and so even though we had all day to rehearse, we still would have liked more.

“There were times when I know Danny Mays and I were really just on the edge of messing it up hugely and I can see those moments in it and I’m glad we got that third take because both Danny and I nearly royally f***ed it up.”

Joe confessed: “It didn’t all go right, but we won’t tell what bits went wrong.”

One of the film’s main themes is regret. The path of Cecelia, Robbie and Bryony’s lives are all forged by that one moment in history and they all long to turn back the clock.

The film’s final stage shows Bryony at the very end of her life – played by the legendary Vanessa Redgrave - now an accomplished author looking back on what she did and admitting her wish to change the events of that one evening in 1936 in a frank television interview.

Joe said: “I had Vanessa in my head and I really wanted to cast Vanessa because I worship the water she walks on.

“But I didn’t cast her until I found a Bryony, so it didn’t matter what she looked like.

“So once we found Saoirse we cast Vanessa and Ramola.

“Anthony Minghella is a friend and I showed him the script before I started filming and we’d talked about the project a fair bit and I was trying to find someone to play the interviewer.

“I didn’t want anyone who would upstage Vanessa, but I wanted someone with authority.

“Then we were all drunk one night and my girlfriend said ‘Let’s get Anthony Minghella.’ So that’s who we ended up with and he was wonderful.”

As Joe has said the adaptation of ‘Atonement’ for the big screen is never going to sit well with every single fan of the book. But this film achieves a lot, both as an adaptation and in its own right.

It tells the tale of a boundless love between two people, and the power of one person to change the path of history with a simple action.

Young Saoirse Ronan and James McAvoy are certainly the true stars of the film, but it is also Keira Knightley’s finest performance to date.

We see Cecelia turn from a shallow, pouting, selfish young girl into a troubled, hardworking young woman in this film. And as Keira has grown up on screen, this is most certainly her coming of age movie.

She has said that she felt for the first time she was cast “not just because I was a pretty face” and she gives a mature and emotional performance.

Joe’s direction does justice both to the book and to the classic British films to which he is obviously paying tribute, and his cast upholds what he is trying to achieve.

This film will excite its audience and tug at their heartstrings, be they fans of the book, or someone who has never even heard of McEwan.