Atonement
2007
Joe Wright
Welcome to the second part of a multi-part Never Seen It mini-series, in which members of Film Club choose movies that they have already seen, and force me to watch it. This week, my sister Brianna chose Atonement. I don't remember why this was added to the list originally, and I didn't know what it was about. I didn't ask for Brianna's input until after I had completed my initial viewing. Since Atonement is more or less about one sibling inadvertently destroying another sibling's life, I feared that the question or prompt Brianna was going to send me was going to be about listing the ways in which her older brother made her life hell. For the record, I don't think there's much I have to atone for. That time that she got locked in bedroom during a keg party? Not my fault. That was middle child Jenny. Maybe the worst thing I ever did was trick Brianna into participating in Yearlong Song Challenge, and when it comes to blogging, I refuse to atone.
Anyways, this is what Brianna said:
"I'm curious as to your thoughts on the concept of the unreliable narrator. In general, if it worked in the movie, if it changes the way you thought about the rest of the story's reality, something like that. Although I guess she owns up at the end so not completely unreliable, but you know what I mean!"
A keen prompt, in that it touches upon the thing that I would've been the most interested in talking about anyway. I love unreliable narrators, and really I love anything that falls under the umbrella of "narrative tricks" or "narratives twisted upon themselves." Maybe because I think about this kind of shit even when the film in question is not inviting such thought, I was particularly primed to think about it in Atonement, when the in-the-film narrator reveals that she made some of the story up.
What I'm saying is that I was able to guess what was happening the very first time it happened, simply because it's always on my mind. We see Briony observe something happening between Robbie and Cecilia at the fountain, and then right afterward, we skip backward in time a few minutes, and see the scene from Robbie and Cecilia's point of view. And because the very first thing that happens in the movie is that Briony is established as a writer, my notes reflect the question: "is this the author writing backstory by moving slightly back in time?"
We don't have to go into this aspect of it too much, but I'll note here that where my empathy lied, and it was with the writer, and how she used her writing to talk about some flaw within herself. Grown-up Briony wrote a semi-non-fictional tell-all novel, I write album reviews, both are achieving the same purpose.
I'm not trying to say that I was able to guess everything in this movie, and I'm certainly not saying that recognizing the narrative device immediately made this movie less enjoyable. Probably the opposite, if I'm being honest. The part where old woman Briony admits to the parts of her novel that were made up were still a total fucking gut-punch, and in fact, the previous understanding of this movie being a narrative in Briony's head probably made it feel more like a gut-punch and less like a rug-pull.
And it also made room for what I thought was real question of the film (question meaning "the question I was asking myself throughout the film, in trying to figure out what it was about"), which was "Who is doing the atoning?" For a while, you think it might be Robbie, who will be coming back from war and atoning for missing out on the life he should have lived, were he not wrongly accused of a crime (and, like, we all knew it was Benedict Cumberbatch the whole time, right?). I thought it was a beautiful reveal that it was actually Briony doing the atoning, and that she atoning for what she did by telling her story, basically. So the "who is the narrator" thing wraps back into the "atoning" question seamlessly.
I don't think that any of this changes my perception of "what really happened" and "what didn't actually happen" in the narrative throughout. I think that maybe being extremely comfortable with the "unreliable narrative" device protected me a bit from that. Look, here's what it comes down to: the movie Atonement is fiction. There is no "what really happened," because none of it happened. The reality of our lives is that someone made a movie and we watched it, that's it. So if we're examining what's true and what's not, you're headed down the wrong path if you ask something like "did Paul and Lola actually get married after Paul molested Lola as a child?" You can't answer that question honestly.
The true answer is "no" because Atonement is fiction. Paul and Lola don't exist. But if you're examining whether the fictional character Briony is telling her truth in her world about Paul and Lola (who exist in her world), then I think that for our purposes as the audience, the examination itself is the point. Our truth is that Atonement is not real, and that we are thinking about its narrative as art, and how it makes us feel. How does it make YOU feel that Atonement never answers the question about whether Paul and Lola got married or if that was a narrative flourish by Briony? That's the real value in unreliable narrators: we get to examine our own relationship with art, and how it makes us feel.
Here's how Atonement made me feel: thrilled. I am a big fan of a movie being presented as something from the mind of a writer, and I appreciate that they made the writer unreliable. The writer's mind is a pretty crazy thing, and I loved seeing that craziness play out in the twisty-turny story that is Atonement.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: We have a Zoom for Kill Bill Volume 1 on Tuesday night! Come join us!
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