Atonement

So I tried to see all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture of 2007. My thoughts are on the other film blog I've started keeping, Movies About Steak Sauce. But my thoughts on Atonement eventually began to grow so large that I decided to cut it in half, placing the review parts on the review blog and the ranting parts on the normal blog.

So anyway, Atonement. I don't think I say this often, so let me just say it now. I hate this movie.

Maybe I was influenced by a negative review, leading me to see more negatives than positives. But things started to feel wrong immediately, when the cinematography felt like it was glowing. Why? Maybe it's a childhood memory thing. Who the hell knows. I also remember a jump-scare scene at one point. Here's a tip for filmmakers: If you're not making a horror movie in any form, don't use jump-scares. That might also be good advice for horror filmmakers, but never mind.

The plot involves a lowly gardener in love with a rich woman. He writes an obscene letter to her as a joke, then writes a heartfelt one. He gives it to her little sister to be delivered, but surprise! He's given her the obscene one! After a previous scene where it looked to her like he made the woman undress, she suspects he's a sex fiend; seeing the letter, she becomes more convinced.

I have to stop here. If this movie had been a comedy, the critics would have savaged it. Roger Ebert, my favorite, has a term for this kind of story: The Idiot Plot. In order for the plot to advance, every character must act like an idiot. Apparently, making it a tragic romance suddenly makes this kind of plot better.

Let's examine. The gardener writes an obscene letter, then a heartfelt one. You'd think that he might be smart enough to hide the obscene one, or burn it. But no, he's an idiot. So he actually puts it in an envelope and gives it to someone. Additionally, the little sister sees him and her, and her older sister is undressing, jumping in the water, and getting out. Wouldn't you, I don't know, ask her why she did that? Well, you're probably not an idiot, then.

And if you knew that someone suspected you of having salacious intents on their sibling, would you go and start having sex with the object of your affection? And if you did, would you go into an office and do this? And even if you did, would the woman drop a ring outside, despite it probably being worth a lot of money? I would hope not, because I'd fear for your children, being raised by idiots.

But they do all that, and Little Sister finds the ring and walks in. Later, her niece is raped. She claims that she saw the gardener do it, and so he's taken off to jail. Cut to years later, into World War II. Gardener's now a soldier! Older Sister is now a nurse! Since when is this a war movie!

Another thing I have to talk about here. There's a big long take where Gardener and his fellow soldiers walk around a camp. Apparently, the entire point of the take is to be long; it's just a big stunt, done for no damn reason. Film School 101 here, people: Boogie Nights' long take introduced us to the characters. Touch of Evil apparently uses it for suspense (I haven't seen it yet). The Player uses it to mock long takes. Notice a theme here? They're doing it for a good reason, one that makes sense within each respective film. Atonement basically does it to waste time and draw attention to itself. I felt bad about it in retrospect, because long takes like that are a lot of work, so you'd think that the director would only put his cast and crew through it for a good reason. But no, apparently he just wanted to show off.

Is that what the whole movie is? Showing off? Perhaps. But eventually, I started to get in touch with it. It started to really work, and then... the ending.

This review is meant to be generally readable, so I'm avoiding discussing the ending here. But let me just say, the ending undercut any feeling of enjoyment I'd had and replaced it with the feeling that I'd been tricked, and not in a good way. The ending is only a few steps away from "It was all a dream!" and it's about as infuriating. The idea that this would endear me to it only makes me angrier.

There has to have been something people liked about this movie, but I don't get it. Is it some "Titanic" thing, where if the romance is big and tragic, people feel it's true? Blah. Give me a mundane, unadulterated romance story. It's probably ten times truer than anything in Atonement. And if you know how it ends, that last sentence is probably twice as true.