Weepers Creepers
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Weepers Creepers It’s Ian McEwan’s novel on steroids. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Atonement Directed by Joe Wright After the enormous success of their fi lm versions of E.M. Forster’s Room With a View...
...In Atonement, which begins at a stately English country manor in 1935, a post-collegiate couple fall in love on the same day a teenage girl is molested...
...Even Martin Scorsese got into the act with a marvelous rendition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a fi lm that merits a second and even third viewing...
...Not so Keira Knightley, whose turn as the movie’s romantic lead is unmemorable except for the fact that you could fi t a wedding ring around her waist...
...Wright’s movie is an act of hysteria...
...But what this movie demonstrates is just how miraculous the best Merchant-Ivory movies really are, and how unjust so many people were in taking the care and wisdom with which those films were made for granted...
...One is by an actor named James McAvoy, whose brash good looks are reminiscent of the young Hugh Grant but who brings a depth and gravity to his character that Grant has always lacked...
...Atonement is worth seeing for McAvoy and Garai alone...
...Here she subdues her sexiness to play the tormented 18-year-old Briony, who is trying to understand and come to grips with the damage she has done...
...Wright wants you to know he’s directing, especially in the movie’s most egregious sequence: a fi ve-minute single take of the British army trapped on the beach in Dunkirk in 1940...
...McEwan’s novel is about the consequences of an act of hysteria...
...All these fi lms manage to be faithful to their distinguished sources and purely cinematic at the same time...
...Joe Wright, a British director, came out with a version of Pride and Prejudice two years ago that is not quite up to those standards...
...They managed to break literary adaptation out of the static Masterpiece Theatre straitjacket without dumbing down the works they were representing on fi lm...
...In the meantime, the young lovers fi nd each other again until they are separated by war, and their ultimate fate is not revealed until Briony is an old novelist nearing death at the turn of the new millennium...
...Atonement features two heartbreakingly good performances...
...Though this charge had some merit in a few Merchant-Ivory examples (The Bostonians and The Remains of the Day, in particular), it was wrongheaded when it came to their best fi lms...
...The other is the work of Romola Garai, who has worked steadily over the past few years in blonde-bombshell roles...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Far from being invisible, Wright turns himself into the movie’s star...
...Sequences intended to express a delirious romanticism are drippy to the point of self-parody...
...And certainly, if you’ve never read the novel, you might fi nd yourself stunned by the ending...
...McEwan writes a gorgeous and controlled prose, transporting even when it is foreboding...
...The same cannot be said, however, for Wright’s adaption of Atonement, Ian McEwan’s rapturously reviewed 2002 novel, which is one of the most exhaustingly overwrought movies I’ve ever seen...
...Movie partisans whose tastes tend to the sensational and pyrotechnical—and who happen to dominate the world of fi lm reviewing—loved to speak slightingly of “Merchant-Ivory costume dramas” which were, they said, so concerned with being of unimpeachable taste that they were lifeless and bloodless...
...But it’s a pretty good movie nonetheless...
...But it is Garai who emerges from this fi lm as a potentially major actress...
...The punishment destroys her family and haunts Briony until she seeks to expiate her sin by becoming a nurse in London a few months into World War II...
...To read Atonement is to be taken in hand by a master in complete command of his craft, so much so that its celebrated shock of an ending—in which McEwan deconstructs the book’s climax in the space of two sentences on its penultimate page—seems as inevitable as the fate of Oedipus...
...Scenes are run forwards and backwards and played three times over...
...The musical score pounds at you...
...But where McEwan is smooth, Wright is jumpy...
...Wright wants to duplicate the power and beauty of McEwan’s prose, and his fi lm is lush and lavish, beautifully photographed and decorated...
...Forster’s Room With a View and Howards End, the director James Ivory and the producer Ismail Merchant became the fi rst and last names in high-end literary adaptation, at fi rst for good and then, ultimately, for ill...
...What they and their screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, actually accomplished was the opposite of bloodlessness...
...At their best, Merchant-Ivory movies suffuse the screen with the wit, passion, and urgency of the novels from which they derive, and in so doing, they make the point that a work of literature need not be a diorama but can be a powerfully immediate and uniquely engaging thing...
...What is supposed to be a portrait of feverish despair turns, instead, into a fun-house ride with a Steadicam...
...For reasons I don’t understand, critics are heaping praise on the sullen and sunken Saoirse Ronan, who plays Briony at 13, and on Vanessa Redgrave, Briony at 67, who serves as the narrator of the movie’s fi nal few minutes...
...The two events are confl ated in a tragic and awful way by the protagonist, a 13-year-old budding writer named Briony who is witness to both events, misunderstands both, and arranges a monstrous punishment...
...his longmaned Darcy is far too much like the romance-novel characters he inspired and his model-thin Lizzie Bennet too much of an ing?nue...
...Mc Ewan is one of those writers who achieves a perfect omniscient invisibility, even when writing in the fi rst person...
...So intent is Wright (in collaboration with screenwriter Christopher Hampton) on bringing McEwan’s extremely literary work to cinematic life that it’s as though he attached jumper cables to the book and attached the other ends to a nuclear reactor...
...Only afterwards, upon second or third refl ection, does the ending reveal itself as a peculiar and entirely unnecessary cheat, reducing his tale into a novel-length version of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge...
...Thanks chiefl y to the MerchantIvory infl uence, the 1990s saw a renaissance of literary adaptation, with a wonderful Sense and Sensibility, a tough-minded Persuasion, and a remarkably clear Wings of the Dove...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 15
