ATONEMENT - 2007

This beatiful movie with the world war II setting,bring romance to all of you who has been watch this movie which bring very excellent by the director Joe Wright (pride and prejudice) about this luxe adaptation of Ian McEwan's stunning 2002 best-selling novel.

Treacheries committed in the name of art and expiation sought are McEwan's themes at their grandest, but director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice) and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons) are convinced that what a moviegoer wants from a literary adaptation is refinement and good breeding. Their movie is abundantly attractive, every scene serenely composed, and every character so fair in love and war that, when the lights come up, it's too easy to say, ''That was good and sad and romantic and classy, now what's for dinner?'' Turning the last page of McEwan's book, in contrast, you're more likely to be shaking from direct devastation and intensity of experience. Different mediums, different messages, I guess — except that the book-loving and movie-loving me holds fast to the conviction that the right artistic alchemy can indeed turn a great book into a different but equally great movie.

This isn't that. So it falls to composer Dario Marianelli to supply the course-correcting clackety bits that shore up the subtext. It makes sense that the clicks and pings embedded in the melodious musical themes arrive haltingly at first — in imitation of a young typist's mechanical limitations. After all, Briony Tallis (the breathtakingly self-possessed Irish talent Saoirse Ronan, who has porcelain skin and a pitiless blue-eyed stare), a self-serious writer-in-training from a rich, idle English family, is all of 13 years old in 1935 when she creates what she doesn't yet know will remain the most important fiction of her career.

The drama-prone adolescent observes sexual electricity between her glamorous older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley, she of the smoky eyes and knife-edge shoulder blades), and Robbie (James McAvoy, he of the utilitarian boyish masculinity), the college-educated son of the family housekeeper, on whom Briony, too, has a crush. And drawing on her own girlish fantasies, sexual naïveté, and artist's dangerous talent for revenge, one night she tells a whopper of a tale accusing Robbie of a crime he didn't commit, a fiction that nevertheless sends him off to jail for years. Knightley and McAvoy don't have much chemistry between them, but they do share handsome, planed features, they speak a richly clipped, 1930s-movie-style English-from-England, and they look positively Abercrombie & Fitchalicious together. So watching Cecilia watching Robbie led away by cops, we can approximately feel her pain.

The very opposite of happily-ever-after enchantment, the story Briony tells ruins lives for decades to come — including that of the storyteller. And as it does, Marianelli's score quickens, increasing the agitated tempo of speed-typing and turning the dingggg that announces a full stop and carriagereturn into a kind of time's-up accusation. Robbie eventually moves from prison to war — he becomes a lovesick soldier in France, one of thousands on the beach at the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, in a world where the killing is real, not a fairy tale. Wright stages a tricky, seamless, five-minute-plus single-shot Steadicam tour across that battle-wrecked beach with a gallantry that aims for terrible-majesty-of-war cinematic ambition but settles for a disconnected Wow, bloody awesome camera work. Cecilia becomes a nurse. And, imitating the sister from whom she's now estranged, Briony (played in young adulthood by Romola Garai) herself seeks redemptive nursing war work, at one point furiously scrubbing blood from her hands in one of the movie's less subtle editorial signifiers. (She also continues to write wherever she can, even in a hospital storage closet — because, like any true writer, she can't not.)

In the end — an ending of such power and narrative originality (in both book and movie) that those who know it ought never breathe a word to those who don't — Briony is an old woman, her stricken stare taken up by Vanessa Redgrave. As ever, the attention to detail is careful — the way Redgrave's bearing echoes Garai's, which echoes Ronan's. Even the defeated, sexless dress worn by old Briony rewards the viewer for remembering the virginal, sexless frock worn by young Briony. Atonement is cultured and tidy like that. It's a nice movie where magnificence is in order.

- Achievment :

Academy Awards, 2008
Winning Oscar :
Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score
Dario Marianelli

Nominated Oscar :
Best Achievement in Art Direction
Sarah Greenwood (art director)
Katie Spencer (set decorator)

Best Achievement in Cinematography
Seamus McGarvey

Best Achievement in Costume Design
Jacqueline Durran

Best Motion Picture of the Year
Tim Bevan
Eric Fellner
Paul Webster

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Saoirse Ronan

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published
Christopher Hampton

Art Directors Guild 2008
Nominated
Excellence in Production Design Award


BAFTA Film Award 2008
Winning Best Film
Tim Bevan
Eric Fellner
Paul Webster

Best Production Design
Sarah Greenwood
Katie Spencer

Golden Globe 2008

Best Motion Picture - Drama

Best Original Score - Motion Picture
Dario Marianelli