I regret to inform you all, but like
Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, I too have made a terrible mistake. In
my literary “sprint” to finish the novel, I seemed to have skipped over the
most important part of the conclusion. In just one paragraph, McEwan snaps his
fingers and creates an entirely different ending in the novel’s last breath.
And this was the paragraph I ran my finger through, without actually taking in
what was being said. I only discovered my error after finishing the film, when
Briony admits to imagining the happy ending to the novel she’d written about
her life, and that in fact, the two people she had wronged, her sister Cecelia
and Robbie, the man she falsely accused of rape, both died in WWII. The scene
that I discussed in my last blog post as being the “second climax” was revealed
to be a lie; that resolution was never reached.
And of course, the one paragraph I
happen to skip over makes me rethink the entire book. In the aftermath of her
initial crime, you can tell that Briony is scrambling to make it right. She
works as a nurse as a form of self-punishment, writes a letter to Cee, and sees
Robbie’s face in the faces of all the wounded soldiers she meets. However, by
the alternative ending that I just discovered, McEwan makes the point that even
one’s best intentions to right a wrong can fail. It left me thinking about the
phrase, what’s done is done, which
made me sad but was extremely powerful as well. I think her eventual admittance
of the truth here complimented the earlier events of the story very well, and
also made me think about the fine line we must draw between what we wish to
believe and what is true.
After watching the movie, I have to
say that I have a much greater appreciation for the book. The faster pace of
the movie kept my interest more steadily, and therefore helped me realize the
strength of McEwan’s intricate plot. When Keane asks us what form our story
would fit best into in his book How to Write a Selling Screenplay, I
believe the correct answer for McEwan was screenplay
instead of novel.
The dreamy face of the movie that
truly made me fall in love with it was the attention to sound that the director
had when creating it. If McEwan had included some of these sounds into his
novel, perhaps with a contraption like the singing Hallmark greeting cards, I
would have enjoyed reading it more. In all seriousness, the sounds in this
movie had me in awe. In the very first scene, we see Briony sitting at a desk,
typing up the story that frames the first one hundred and forty pages of the
novel. The loud clicking of the keys rings like music, and becomes a theme that
is carried out throughout the movie. After Briony’s finished the last page, she
pulls it from the typewriter and marches off to show it to Emily, her mother.
The sound of the clicking keys matches her footsteps and grabbed my attention
due to its uniqueness. These clicking sounds come up in many other scenes in
the movie and serve as a transition from one perspective to another. For
example, when we switch to Briony’s perspective at the hospital where she is
nursing the wounded soldiers, the scene begins with the now familiar clicking
of typewriter keys and a line of nurses militantly walking towards us. This
scene made me wish I had seen the movie in theaters; I cannot even begin to
imagine the effect this would have on the big screen with surround sound.
Similarly, in the pivotal scene
where Briony watches an argument Cecilia and Robbie have from her bedroom
window, a bee buzzes against the glass. We zoom in on this bee before the
scene below comes in to view. The smallness of this buzzing bee made me think
about how small one perspective can be, a theme stressed throughout the novel
and film.
In addition to the sound quality, I
thought that this movie greatly succeeded at conveying the inner thoughts of
each character that were so thoroughly explained in the book. In simple scenes,
we are able to know exactly how the character in question was feeling without
having to be told. For example, in the scene that Briony witnessed from her
window, Cecilia jumps into the fountain in order to retrieve a piece of her
vase that Robbie accidentally broke off. She emerges from the water, soaked,
and storms away from Robbie. Then the camera focuses on Robbie, sitting on the
edge of the fountain, putting his hand against the surface of the water from
which Cecilia just sprung out of. In one moment, we discover Robbie’s feelings
for Cecilia and feel as though we are intruding on an intimate moment. In my
opinion, I thought this was much more effective than the lengthy description
found in McEwan’s story.
I also thought Joe Wright, the
director of this film who deserves to be recognized, translated McEwan’s rapid
transition of perspectives beautifully. With so many different viewpoints that
McEwan brings up, I can only imagine the difficulty that this creates when
trying to capture them all on film. However, Wright is able to delicately
separate them with the use of his attention to detail. A moment in which I
thought he did this particularly well was when Robbie rang the doorbell in
black tuxedo, arriving to the dinner party that would ultimately change his
life. After the ding of the doorbell, we cut to Briony telling her cousin,
Lola, about the letter that Robbie had bestowed to her to give to her sister,
Cecilia. In a scene of intense whispering, Lola accuses Robbie of being a “sex
maniac”, a conclusion they made that later convinces Briony she saw Robbie
raping Lola. Following this conversation, we hear the doorbell ring again and cut
to Robbie, unsure of whether he should attend the dinner party or not. This
loop in time that Wright creates clearly explained to the audience that these
events were occurring at the same time.
Compared to the book, the movie
portrayed Paul Marshall as a much more obvious suspect. In a scene where
Marshall gives Lola a piece of chocolate and tells her to bite it, the camera lingers a second too long on Marshall’s face
and we are immediately aware of his desire to seduce Lola. In the movie, he
repeats these instructions multiple times with a sense of urgency that made me
recognize the creepiness of the situation. In the book, I didn’t stop to think
twice about the scene, and was later shocked to discover that he was the “true”
criminal. This film’s attention to small details like this is what made me
think of it as a work of art, as opposed to just a two-hour source of
entertainment. There was something beautiful in the way Wright was able to tell
so much by saying so little, and I admire him for it.
MOVIES WATCHED: 3
SCREENPLAY PAGES WRITTEN: 12
NOVEL PAGES WRITTEN: 48
PAGES LEFT IN HOW TO WRITE A SELLING
SCREENPLAY: 235
PAGES LEFT IN MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR
PECULIAR
CHILDREN: 260
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