Atonement

Have you come across something that you completely enjoyed or you know that it is truly a work of art but you simply are at a loss of words in how to describe it? That has been my problem in writing my review of this film. For more than a week now I have been pondering my thoughts and have tried to come up with something brilliant to say about a completely brilliant film. I realized walking through the grocery last night that there is pretty much nothing that I can say that could do this film justice.

A typewriter, a benign noisy tool of communication that has long gone by the wayside, is the catalyst for the movie adaptation of Ian McEwan's epic novel Atonement. The equivalent of modern day email, the typewritten note is the method of communication that is instrumental in creating the conflict in which the story revolves.

Each of us at some point in our lives has done something that was wrong, but at the time of the act it was not clearly wrong. Then later, (sometimes sooner than later), we have realized how wrong it was. Most of us can come up with that one thing almost immediately. However for most our actions do not result in someone going to prison and later being sent off to a horrible war.

Atonement was filmed throughout England covering the quaint and beautiful countryside and the not so lovely row houses in the tenements of the early 1940's. The story spans seven decades of time of the Tallis sisters, Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Briony (Saoirse Ronan and Romola Garai). The story begins pre-World War II and concludes in present day.

With several flashback sequences and imaginative moments the viewer must allow the the story to engulf them. There are some movies in which you can just sit, watch, take a nap, steal a smooch from your partner, this is not one of those movies. You must watch intently or you could become very lost very fast.

This is absolutely a full price film.