By Skyler Mason, Year 11
“A forbidden love. A secret letter. A child’s imagination. A false accusation.”
As one of the taglines used to promote Atonement leading up to its 2007 release, I feel that this perfectly introduces the circumstances that culminated at the film’s end. An adaptation of Ian McEwan’s tragic romance, the film portrays the disastrous, and unfortunately, irreversible consequences of a young girl meddling in her sister’s life. This results in an extremely bleak life for both of them and their eventual deaths. The film then shows the decades following, in which she grapples with the gravity of her error.
As deeply frustrating as it is to watch the events unfold, the film is visually striking as it shifts dramatically from the English countryside of the mid-to-late 1930s to the horrors of Europe during the Second World War. What I found most thought-provoking about the film was the exploration of what it means to make amends and the underlying question that is, is it truly possible to atone for the unforgivable?
In this, I will examine the extent to which the protagonist, Briony, successfully makes amends, but first it’s necessary to establish how much of the fault was hers to atone for.
While I can’t deny she was fanciful and imaginative, let’s look at the events from her perspective: Cecilia undressing at the fountain, Robbie’s vulgar letter, and the sordid affair in the library. Without the context the audience is given, this evidence is fairly incriminating, and her bias against Robbie is therefore understandable. When it comes to her false accusation, arguably her worst mistake, she was young and felt she was protecting her sister. In sum, her transgressions can be condensed into a gross misinterpretation of the situation around her.
Nonetheless, and for all intensive purposes, it’s fair to say she ruined both the lives of her sister and her sister’s lover and served as a catalyst for the tragic events that would come to follow. With that said, the rest of the film follows Briony’s pursuit of atonement, hence the title.
Her first act of redemption is cutting herself off from her family and becoming a nurse-in-training, viewing the brutal work as self-punishment. While I can appreciate the effort, this does little except ease her own guilt. Secondly, Briony intends to revoke her statement and correct her recount to the police, although she is unable to do this before the damage is done. Finally, she writes a book which retells their love story with the happy ending she felt they were owed.
Nevertheless, her efforts fall flat in the eyes of the audience and do little to quell the hate she receives, which I feel is for two main reasons. First of all, she acted as though the book made up for her mistakes, where in reality it came nowhere near to making up for the happiness she robbed her sister of. Secondly, her book felt self-serving, like it was to alleviate her own guilt rather than actually atone, because the people she would be atoning to are dead, changing the ending to make herself feel better doesn’t change that. Ultimately, I guess one could recognise the title as her pursuit of atonement rather than its actual achievement.
