Atonement

Quote of the day:
““Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.”
--Calvin Trillin

I was disappointed in Atonement. It was nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, and I’m not sure why.

The novel on which it’s based got good reviews, and Merrie liked it. The critical vote on the film was mixed, but some critics just adored it.

Everything is fine--quite fine, actually--until about a half-hour in, when the action switches to World War One and stays there way too long. It’s unclear why this is necessary. It seemed to me that suddenly a second movie had begun with only a tangential relationship to the first.

I kept waiting for these pieces to fit together. But they never did. There may have been explanatory scenes edited out to keep the film to two hours. Even so, the film should’ve been about 20 minutes shorter still.

Let me back up a bit. The film begins when a 13-year-old girl witnesses a crime but identifies the wrong man as the perpetrator. I found myself caught up in wondering why she did that. It’s a compelling premise for a movie.

But then the action abruptly switches to the battlefields of the war, where the man accused of the crime is now fighting. The question of the wrong that’s been done to him has left the theatre to buy popcorn. There must have been a long line, because the question doesn’t come back until much later.

It just didn’t make sense to me. As a result, the rest of the film didn’t make sense either.

Maybe I’m missing something incredibly obvious.