This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 12:12 am and is filed under A, Academy Awards - best picture winners and nominees, Drama, Movie Reviews, Romance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, James McAvoy, Keira Knightley,
Reviewing movies like these is my greatest challenge as a critic. This is a quality product with a good story, good, but overrated acting, and some solid direction, but I still did not like it all that much. So, how do I rate it? As an excellent quality motion picture that will win more awards than Albert Einstein at a Jr. High science fair? Or shall I rate it, according to the entertainment value that it held for me? Being a simple, semi-educated selfless man, I think I will go with the latter; risking the respect of some to save the time, and money, of others. Hence, it gets three stars from me and will probably win best picture. Atonement is exasperatingly slow in several spots as director Joe Wright lingers over scenes, capturing great detail. This is nice, but can we get on with the story? The acting is good, but I disagree with some of the generous praise it has received. It will win plenty of awards since it is a British period piece and has many scenes at a country manor. These three conditions make it an automatic choice for critical acclaim and it will probably win one award for every ten people who see it. I liked Atonement, at times, wished it would end, already, at other times, and I am unlikely to ever watch it again, unless forced to do so, as part of some interrogation ritual.
About half of the film is set in an English country manor in 1935. The story centers around Briony and Cecilia Tallis (Saoirse Ronan and Keira Knightley), the 13 and 18 year old daughters of the house, and on the son of one of the housekeepers, Robert (James McAvoy), an aspiring doctor, for whom the family has taken the responsibility for educating. Briony is an aspiring writer, who has a crush on the older Robert, who is in turn interested in the older sister, Cecilia. Briony, misunderstanding circumstances, does something horrible, but I don’t want to say more than that, in case you manage to get to the theatre without seeing some overly informative review, or trailer, that blows the path of the story for you. I did like the endng.
Those of you who loved the Oscar sweeping English period pieces of the past, will probably find this one to be right up your alley. Those of you who thought that Fargo should have beat out The English Patient in 1997, and that Gosford Park should have gone straight to the bargain rental shelf in 2001 instead of being nominated for seven Oscars, this one is not for you. I found it overly self-indulgent and too slow moving through it’s beaufully shot scenes.
