Atonement- Feeling bad about eating so much popcorn!

Christmas Day! What do most Jews do? Eat Chinese & go to the movies. But since we are reformed we had assorted salads for lunch that I had picked up from our local organic market…and decided to make dinner out of an extra large popcorn, diet soda & sour candies.
Lately we had seen mostly critically claimed Indy movies back to back… Most of them were extremely powerful, well acted & artsy. However most of them happened to be also brutal.
Depicting the worst of human conditions; such as greed, power, and the killing instinct…
So on this lazy afternoon I really wanted to see a genre that feels me with hope, love & romance… Well the obvious choice was Atonement. http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809714841/info
This rich adaptation of Ian McEwan's stunning 2002 best-selling novel was directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice) and adopted by the screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons). Well it seemed like a dream team to me.
(Also I am a sucker for period movies…I can watch any Merchant Ivory Production or
Scorsese’s -Age of Innocence time after time.)
It is the details, the richness of the rituals, the ceremony of it all, and the costumes… that sweep me off my feet into the dreamland. And sometimes I feel that is the magic of the cinema or a great book.
I have hard time judging this movie. It did entertain me. Keira Knightley & James McAvoy are irresistible to watch. It is like a “Chanel Mademoiselle” commercial. (I am sure they were the corporate sponsors…since Ms. Knightley is their new spokes person.)
But every time Briony (played at 13 by the remarkably poised Saoirse Ronan came on to the screen you are hooked a bit.
The Film is about deception, guilt, atonement, and regret…The popcorn was deliciously salty & the candy was sour but sweet.
Then in the last 15 minutes or so of the film …maybe even less then that Ms. Vanessa Redgrave appears as the older Briony …And once again without a doubt…Stills the whole movie.
I have been in love with her since I saw her in Julia (1977). I don’t think I understood the film at its depth at age 13…but it left me stunned. As my life went through different stages I watched her in that movie & each time I connected with her more & more… Her strength, her politics, and her love for (Jane Fonda’s character) Lillian, her religion, her motherhood, her principles, her humility, and her courage….and her love of caviar…
.
Watching her, I made more sense to me…I accepted the beauty of the contradictions of my character & persona.
It was all subliminal I guess …but today it all makes sense why I identified so deeply with Julia/Vanessa all the same person to me. (Well it turns out the Academy agreed with me…and gave her the Golden Boy Oscar for her Supporting Role…)
She does not support…she is the tour de force…that gets supported…
All I can say is before Meryl there was Vanessa & after Meryl….I am not sure if they will ever make them like that ever again.
I saw a quote of hers recently where she says:
“It’s a kinky part of my nature- to meddle.”
That is probably what makes her so brilliant…she meddles, she studies, she lives and she projects…and we watch her MESMERIZED.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. While completing his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.
McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday.