This is a pretty tough movie to watch. The very first time I saw it, I was so lost and hated it. The ending was awful! However, after watching it a second time I was able to kind of understand things better and appreciate the poetic justice of the end of the movie.
This was Keira Knightley's first big movie after Pride and Prejudice, and her leading man is James McAvoy! Ummmm how can this movie be bad?? There's lots of reasons. There are a lot of time jumps in this movie, and so you can get lost in those, and also you don't really know what's real and not real.
Andrew was checking the time on this movie like every 30 minutes seeing how much time was left. I don't think he enjoyed it very much.
So in this movie, we have Briony, who is a very ambitious little 13 year old girl who has a passion for writing and also has a huge imagination. Her older sister Cecilia (knightley) is a Cambridge schoolgirl at home for the summer. Robbie is the housekeeper's son at their house but was also put through Cambridge through the generosity of the girl's deceased father. So, Robbie and Cece have an unspoken love for each other, never acknowledging their feelings due to difference in social class. Well one day they are hanging out by the fountain at their house and a piece of a vase breaks off in the fountain. Cece's pissed and strips down to her slip to go and get it. She and Robbie have an argument and they both leave feeling as though things have changed. Briony sees this event take place from her bedroom window and doesn't really understand what just happened, but it leaves a lasting impression on her.
Robbie attempts to write a letter to CeCe apologizing for the afternoon's event, and on his way to the big house for dinner, he gives Briony the letter to deliver. Unfortunately he accidentally gave Briony the wrong letter, and she instead has a scandalous letter that Robbie wrote but never meant for CeCe to see. Of course Briony is such a busybody that she must be in everyone's business so she reads it. She and her cousin Lola discuss the contents of this letter and determine that Robbie is a "sex maniac" which is very disconcerting to her, since she has had a crush on him for years. On the way to the dining table, Briony walks in on Robbie and CeCe being intimate in the library, which thus confirms her new thought of Robbie. Later that evening some little boys disappear so a search party is assembled, and while Briony is searching, she comes upon her cousin being raped. As she is the eye witness to this, she assumes that is must be that maniac Robbie.
He then gets sent to jail,but because WWII just happened, he is given the option of either staying in prison or becoming a soldier. Cece then becomes a nurse. Later Briony will follow in her footsteps. The rest of the movie is just bizarre and a lie. To make a long story short, Briony becomes an author, and writes her 21st book Atonement. This is when she tells the truth of what happened on that fateful night. Through the entire second half of the movie, we are under the impression that Robbie and CeCe reconnect during the war and are together, so we are happy about that right? Well the truth is that Robbie actually died during battle before he could ever reconnect with CeCe, and CeCe also died the same year he did, under a tunnel that was flooded during a bombing. Briony gave them in her book the eternal happy ending that she prevented them from having, so that she might come to peace with her terrible mistake.
<-- That's them dying
The person who really did rape her cousin Lola was Sherlock Holmes from the amazing new BBC series Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch. He has a creeper mustache in the movie, so it of course had to be him. Later on he marries Lola, so that she can never take the witness stand against him in the case that Briony ever wanted to change her story and tell the truth.
The second time around this movie isn't as awful. It's easier to follow, but the movie is still slow-going. There is little dialogue throughout and we end up just listening to silence while looking at pretty scenes. Which there are plenty of pretty scenes. One of the good things about this movie is that it shows some really great cinematography. I guess that's why it got 7 Academy Award nominations. I guess also watching it a second time is better, because you know what happens. When I first saw it I was so pissed at the ending, that it wasn't some grand romance like I was led to believe in the previews, which might be why I had such a negative attitude towards this movie.
Andrew's Closing Thought: This was the worst movie we've had to watch so far.
Up Next: August Rush
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