Thursday, January 10, 2008

Atonement (2007)


Ian McEwan, one of Britain's most accomplished novelists, has been in the habit of showing his books to his wife as soon as they're completed. When she finished reading Atonement, she did something unprecedented: She cried. That, McEwan has said, is when he knew he'd written something special. Which he had. An assured and deeply moving work, Atonement, is at once one of the most affecting of contemporary love stories and a potent meditation on the power of fiction to destroy and create, to divide and possibly heal. It is the kind of novel that doesn't get written very often or, if it does, rarely gets transferred to the screen with the kind of intensity and fidelity we find here. For, as directed by Joe Wright from Christopher Hampton's adroit script and acted with fervor by Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, this is one of the few adaptations that gives a splendid novel the film it deserves…... ~Kenneth Turan