..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Atonement
Directed by Joe Wright

I finally caught Atonement. And it was good.

But it is not great.

Keira Knightley’s face is great. Again, the costumes are great. And the tone is arch.

But is this a great movie? Would it fit into a Top Ten of Merchant/Ivory films? Does it spread itself too thin to establish itself as more of a movie than it really is?

This is no déjà vu of Pride & Prejudice. There is a romantic subtext, but the foreground is serous and misery laden most of the way. You can tell from the images that Joe Wright has improved as a director… but he still isn’t a director who can wrangle magic from simple images.

Keira Knightley is at her most restrained and elegant here. She is, in a much better way than Ms. Blanchett in E2, a mannequin in this film… or really, a flesh hanger. She is endlessly in clothes that hang tightly to her curves and drape seductively over the rest of her. She really looks, for the first time on a movie screen, like a woman and not a beautifully gangly girl. The performance is all restraint until she gets around to asking directly for love, lust, or some combination.

But again, is it a great performance?

The story of Atonement is quite small and simple… really a 45 minute piece. It’s a romantic O Henry with a war as background. But here, it is supersized in a way that doesn’t add any major elements that make the stretch warranted.

The moment where I was sure we were in a spot of trouble was when Wright gives the full Children of Men treatment (an endless shot following around our lead character) to a beach filled with soldiers dying and waiting to go home. The shot is fine. But there is no reason for it whatsoever… except to fill time and to make the movie look bigger than it really is. Perhaps Working Title took the lesson from the last Ian McEwan film adaptation, Enduring Love, which made less than half a million dollar domestic at Paramount Classics and was, similarly, intimate. But making the intimate epic is not easy.

I like this movie. I do. I like all the performances. I like most of the imagery. But for a tiny film, it’s rather bloated.

Awards-wise, I wouldn’t count it out… or in… or anything. The field is just too odd to feel too sure of anything. Right about now, even the long shot from out of right field, Juno, is looking like it might have a shot. Crazy, I know.

- David Poland