It is also a film all too aware that it is an adaptation of a critically-acclaimed novel, a fact that makes it complacent and even loose-fitting.
The best novel-to-screen adaptations -- we have had two spectacular ones this year in There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men -- divest the force of the novel with cinema's own unique energy, exaggerating and diffusing as they see fit. Wright simply falls back on McEwan's novel, and this just won't do.
The result is depressing. We have a film that moves sketchily, in fits and spurts, it's flow ebbing and mood varying with an unforgivable abruptness, unless you constantly indulge it with the consideration of how uphill the task of making a great book into a two-hour movie is. I'm sorry to say I haven't read the McEwan novel, which is why I'll give the director the benefit of doubt.
Atonement is a film romanticising melodrama, and while it may well be a loyal adaptation, it certainly isn't a fine one. Like a dizzyingly long single-take tracking shot at the corpse-and-chaos littered Dunkirk Beach -- originally stunning and masterful, but eventually, just tedious -- this film is trying too hard.
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