The 2007 film 'Atonement', directed by Joe Wright and based on a novel by Ian McEwan, follows three individuals as their lives are impacted by each others actions and the broader context of society in which they lived around the time of the second world war.
Robbie (James McAlvoy) is the working class son of a gardener on an aristocratic country estate in the late 1930s. Cecilia (Kiera Knightly) is the daughter of the estate's owner and Briony is her younger sister. A powerful sexual frisson exists between Robbie and Cecilia, a connection that is sensed but not fully understood by the 13 year old Briony, who believes that she is in love with Robbie.
Robbie is accused of a crime he didn't commit. He is convicted, partly because of the false evidence police elicit from the jealous and imaginative Briony, but equally because of the class and sexual prejudices of British society; despite his posh accent and Oxford education, he is little more than the aristocrats' pet dog and receives a similar standard of rough justice from his master.
Robbie is released from prison to serve as cannon fodder in the war time British Army. By pure chance, Robbie runs into Cecilia, who is now a nurse, in London. They rekindle their relationship and confirm their love for each other, just in time before Robbie is sent to France as part of the doomed British Expeditionary Force, tasked with repelling Germany's invading armies.
The British army is routed and we join a mortally wounded Robbie and two fellow enlisted soldiers as they struggle to make it to the evacuation point on the coast, Robbie desperate to return to the brief peace he found in the form of Cecilia's love. The ensuing scene of the evacuation on the beaches of Dunkirk, a reality vividly conveyed through the fevered perception of the dying Robbie, is the most powerful of the film.
The Dunkirk beach scene uses a continuous steady-cam (a stablished handheld camera) to follow the three soldiers around a surreal, horrific, scene of death, destruction and desperate hedonism. This scene intersects Robbie's personal tragedy at the hands of pre-war British order with the chaotic collapse of that order on the beaches of Dunkirk; the Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but by the same token the second world war was very nearly lost there too.
This scene is beautifully written, orchestrated and shot and accompanied by one of the most moving pieces of film music I have heard for a while; Elegy for Dunkirk, written by Dario Marianelli and performed by the Prague City Philharmonic Orchestra, blends classical swelling string instruments with a male choir rendition of John Greenleaf Whittier's Dear Lord and Father of Mankind (1872). The film is worth watching for this scene alone.
When leaving the cinema, I heard one latter middleaged party comment that they liked the film but that they didn't approve of the Dunkirk scene; I have a theory why:
The British relationship with the second world war, and to Dunkirk, is often revisited but almost never revised, to the extent that the war experience has become mythic in quality. Basically, modern Britain has come to accept its own wartime propoganda as 'truth' in a way that perhaps even the wise of the time, who could remember the first world war and the depression, never did.
If we peel away the love story and focus on the context of Atonement - the critical picture of the disintegration of a less than glorious Imperial Britain - then the film challenges this myth machine. Sadly, the film was probably a success despite, rather than because, of this context.
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