"Atonement" or bifurcation?

The new film adaptation of Ian McEwan's "Atonement" is without a doubt an accomplishment, but not exactly a perfect one. The grand sweep a narrative like this seems to ask for is missing; the film has to change tone half-way through. Perhaps this was in the nature of the book (I'm afraid I haven't read it, so am entirely unqualified to be the film's reviewer, on that score); or of its plot: one expects that the atmosphere of the pre-war scenes should not be without frivolity, which in the nature of things sets them apart from the tragic mood of the later sections. (Then again perhaps this itself is a historical cliche - why should we automatically assume the interbellum years didn't contain their own share of personal misfortunes? or vice versa, that some people didn't have a "good war"? was the reaction of the friend I saw the film with last night.)

This break is enforced by a quite decided gap in cinematic quality (and consistency) between the first hour and the rest of the film. The later sections have their glories: one is the already notorious tracking shot around Dunkirk beach, which must have tested the film crew to their limits (as well as the composer, who had to fit several verses of "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" as seamlessly as possible into counterpoint with the full orchestral score). There were several fine bits of acting too I thought: the confrontation scene between Briony and the couple she wronged, and more subtly the television interview with Vanessa Redgrave playing Briony as an ageing novelist. But there were also some fairly stale parts - sentimental scenes like the dream encounter between Robbie and his mother, or Briony's conversation with a dying French soldier (- the sentiment inadequately disguised by playing the whole scene in French).

The first half of the film on the other hand felt extraordinarily fresh, beautifully judged in emotional tone and balance, and handled with startling fluidity and skill. The intercutting between the protagonists, obviously an essential feature in a drama of romantic separation, was superb: Cecilia, disgusted with the conversation, dives into the garden pool, and in answering motion Robbie surfaces from a duck in his bathtub, gazing upward meditatively - the camera follows - through the skylight to the bomber humming overhead in the blue summer sky. Or more ecstatically as both prepare for dinner, Cecilia dressing in blurred mirror reflection, Robbie typing the fateful note of apology to the strains of Puccini (if it was) on his gramophone, both somehow woven together in a sequence almost the equal in tenderness of Julie Christie's and Donald Sutherland's in Don't Look Now. (There was nothing correspondingly inspired in the later scenes - Keira Knightley looking sad on a beach cuts to James McAvoy looking sad in a field of poppies - both beautiful shots; but their editing the depths of banality.) The psychological transitions were just as acute. A hilarious satire of childish precociousness cunningly highlights the very trigger which sets off catastrophe - Lola's rape and Briony's misaccusation both appear as consequences of their "acting above their age". And in its early days, Robbie and Cecilia's romance is a fine mixture of comedy and passion.

What prompts the title of this post is the very end of the film. To be exact, the ends - plural: although not as even-handedly as the book (I am told), we are still given two conclusions for Robbie and Cecilia's story. One is more tragic, but at the same time less realistically played, so that the emotional power is for me undercut by ambiguity. It isn't that I can't handle ambiguity, or want everything cut-and-dried; but I am really quite uncertain what it is supposed to achieve here. I felt the same way about Yann Martel's "Life of Pi": what exactly is the motivation for two mutually-excluding stories? What is the interference pattern (if you'll pardon the gratuitous use of analogies from quantum physics) that is supposed to emerge from this strange narrative "double-slit experiment"? Because it seems to me that the introduction of this level of self-consciousness is signally inappropriate to the tragic themes of both books. Self-reference works in the comic or the ironic mode, but for genuinely tragic material, fate should appear (as it did for the Greeks) as the horribly inexorable, unshakeable structure and ultimate author of reality. We humans - whether characters or authors - cannot change it; we only come to terms with it. One kind of coming to terms is indicated by the title of the film. The word "atonement" has one of the plainest and yet profoundest etymologies I know: like many a German word, all you need to do is split it, and you have "at-one-ment"; to "make/set (at) one", to unify, to make whole. Can it really be right to create bifurcating stories, Borges' "garden of forking paths", in the service of an act whose whole significance is one of unification?