ATONEMENT [R]

A young English girl flirting with puberty – and, on occasion, with the young groundskeeper who works on her family’s estate – catches sight of her older sister taking off her clothes before the very eyes of that same young groundskeeper and jumping into the estate’s fountain. Emerging from the water, she stands before the young man like Aphrodite herself, proud and bold and clad only in a soaking slip.

Does the girl understand what she’s just seen? For that matter, does the audience Pride and Prejudice director Joe Wright’s new film Atonement understand it? All too well, as it turns out… and not at all.

Wright’s film, adapted by screenwriter Christopher Hampton from the novel by Ian McEwan, explores several such incriminating moments, first from a lens of shock and outrage and then, a bit later, from a the perspective of the young couple who so excite the jealously of young Briony (Saoirse Ronan).

Older sister Cecelia (Keira Knightley) is madly in love with young Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of the family’s late groundskeeper, who has taken up his father’s chores around the estate for a while, between finishing up at Oxford and beginning his education as a physician. Turner is something of a scholarship project for the parents of Briony and Cecelia; he is a bright young man they have opted to elevate from servitude to respectability.

But there is always an undercurrent, the story tells us, that places servants, even intelligent, liberated ones like Turner, below complete trustworthiness; when Briony wrongly identifies Turner as a sexual assailant who has either seduced or brutalized her cousin, the wheels of justice grind swiftly and pulverize Turner’s life.

But Turner is not the only affected. His arrest and disgrace create a rift Cecelia and her family, and young Briony herself grows up to understand that in her immature anger she has brought great suffering down on the people she most loves. Adult Briony (Romola Garai), seeking to atone for her mistake, follows Cecelia into the ranks of World War II nurses, attempting to heal broken men as a literal means of restoring health and life to make up for the lives she’s shattered.

Turner, meantime, ends up behind enemy lines in occupied France, his life endangered by a wound placed (with too-overt symbolism) over his heart.

For the movie’s occasional lack of subtlety, however, it is a gorgeously shot and unfailingly graceful work. Wright brings a sense of history and majestic sweep to the screen, while never losing the story’s innate sense of intimacy. The cinematography by Seamus McGarvey is Oscar worthy: the camera glides and hovers, tracking characters up hillsides or soaring and weaving in a gloriously long, unbroken shot around and about a surreal beach resort at Dunkirk, France, transformed by the war into a nightmare of chaos, misery, misplaced debauchery, and an end-of-the-world sense of lowering sky and troubled sea.

In this setting, McAvoy – the best thing about movies like Starter for 10 and finally getting roles, here and in The Last King of Scotland, that are equal to his talent – does a masterful job bringing his character’s internal maelstrom of despair and rage into alignment with the disorder all around him.

Romola Garai (Amazing Grace), sensibly allowed to express a full range of emotion though always anchored by her guilt, is exceptional and sympathetic as a more mature Briony; but it’s Saoirse Ronan who steals the show, fairly pulsating with unfamiliar sexual need and electricity even though her tender age of 13 still entails plenty of childish innocence, including an unfiltered emotional savagery.

Movies about war and romance fail all too often (as with Flyboys and the horrendously misjudged Pearl Harbor); Wright puts the emphasis on the emotional lives, and the emotional wreckage, that the war scenes round out and illuminate, making this movie more like a cross between The Thin Red Line and A Passage to India.

Atonement has nothing to apologize for: it’s an exceptional movie, complete unto itself, and fully realized in every frame.••• –Kilian Melloy