Power to the Author!

Atonement.

–noun. satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury; amends.

I have seen this film, and I loved it. Despite Keira Knightley and her overpowering jut on the bottom half of her face. Her underbite makes the smoking look simulatneously natural and staged, if that is indeed possible.

Compensating for KK and her jaw is the oh-so-lovely James McAvoy (oh my!). And That Green Dress. I don't often wish to be super thin or super rich, but looking at that dress makes me want both. Because you can't have one without the other.

Generally I am not a huge fan of the multiperspectived narratives. Sure they can be done well. Run Lola Run is nothing short of brilliant, but that is more about multiple perspectives in time. Magnolia, the pin up film of the multinarratived tale just shits me. What with Tom Cruise and the frogs. I never got how so many film buffs like it so much.

Atonement the film shifts in charater perspective and in temporal frame. And it does so cohesively and with style. It has a fantastic score, with the digetic bleeding into the non, to tie in the shifts and keep a strong sense of self-awareness to the story telling. The film doesn't let you get too lost in the narrative, and I mean that in a good way. The novel doesn't introduce this self-reflexivity until the epilogue.

What with having read the novel after seeing the film (by a number of years), it is Keira, James, Vanessa Redgrave and the cast from Joe Wright's film that I see, rather than the casting of my own creation. Which I usually don't enjoy as much as my own imagination's version. But in this instance I got to spend more time alone with Mr McAvoy under my doona, so I didn't mind too much.

The form of the novel give the idea of The Author As God more weight than the film does. The notion that a writer can atone for their mistakes through their work makes more sense, and has more power in the reading than it does on the silver screen, with Vanessa Redgrave playing just another character reading words that someone wrote for her. Ian McEwan himself has scribed these words about the cathartic processes of writing himself. And sure, he was never a 13 year old girl, and so it is doubtful his actions directly mirror Briony's. But what mistakes has he rewritten? And the other author's of the world?

While there are whole tracts of description - of war, of the grounds, of the hospital - that I found dull and emotionless or repetetive, it was just as easy to slide over them to the real story of the characters.

After putting down the finished book, it was one of those reading experiences where I felt sad. Not just because Robbie & co didn't get their happy ending in real life, but also because I had finished, and now it was time for me to leave Cee and Robbie and Briony, and get back to the world of reality. With no green dress.