I’ve been thinking about why I hated Atonement so much, and why so many people don’t. Part of it is what I take to be its incompleteness. A thwarted love story turns into a meandering, half-done war movie, tied together or torn apart, apparently, by a little girl’s dishonesty, which I failed to bring myself to care about.
The cinematography, however, is superb in places, which at times seems completely out of place.It is as if the cinematographer was on set with these horrible actors working with a hopelessly convoluted screenplay, and decided maybe to try to make something beautiful out of it. Artistry from boredom, perhaps?
One particular shot strikes me as incredibly well done and so out of place that it comes off as pretentious. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think it has to do with its placement in the film. The shot comes near the end of an already-too-long movie, when the soldiers reach the beach and there’s a mass of confusion about who belongs where, and how they will get home. It is a continuous shot, I don’t know how long, that is elaborately choreographed, and includes a ferris wheel, injured soldiers, camerawork moving from character to character, complicated dialogue. I get what it’s doing: it’s showing the confusion, disillusionment and surrealism that accompanies war. But it stands out almost too much, and it takes place after much crosscutting back to the hospital in England and after the story has become so convoluted that the shot seems to be a comment on the film itself.
It was while rewatching Children of Men that I figured out why that shot didn’t work. CoM also has a very long tracking shot during a battle, with much the same effect, but it works. Why? Because the film sets you up for it with handheld camera work, long takes, and fairly dismal mise-en-scene from the beginning. That tracking shot is a culmination of all that came before, both stylistically and narratively, whereas with Atonement it stands out, becomes obvious in a film that relies on trickery and tired narrative and cinematic techniques to pull at heartstrings in the widest possible way.
