Ep. 30 - Atonement with Roseanne Caputi

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On this 30th episode of Fabulous Film and Friends, my sister and I are going to discuss the 2007 romantic war drama Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightly, Saorsie Ronan, Benecict Cumberbatch, Romola Garai, Brenda Blethlyn, Harriet Walter and Vanessa Redgrave in what is arguably one of the finest war films ever made, second only to Apocalypse Now.

The synopsis:

Briony Tallis is a fanciful and precocious girl of 13, skilled at writing plays and stomping about on her family’s palacial English estate in 1936, meddling in her family’s affairs and seemingly oblivious to the brewing World War, despite talk from Paul Marshall, a rich chocolatier and family guest. Briony witnesses Robbie Turner, an educated housekeeper’s son living on the family estate, making love to her sister Cecilia in the main house library, she is confused and angered by what she saw and takes it to mean something else.  This incident is compounded by the fact that earlier Robbie handed Briony a letter to give to Cecilia  where he mistakenly stuffed the envelope with a sexually explicit message which Briony promptly read and misunderstood.

Concurrently, Briony’s cousin Lola and her younger brothers Pieorot and Jackson are house guests during the same weekend. When the younger brothers decide to run away back to London to their parents, Lola is sexually assaulted during a search expedition for the boys. Briony witnesses the end of the assault and sees someone running off, and assumes it is Robbie.

Telling her family and the authorities, Robbie is arrested and charged for the crime and spends four years in prison, only released to serve as a private in the English army, and is making his way to the beach at Dunkirk in Northern France in 1940.

Gravely wounded, it is Robbie’s fresh memories of Cecelia from six months earlier --where they met for a brief moment over tea and where she pledged her devotion to him and demands that he “come back to her” --that are keeping him alive as he tries to make it back to England to reunite with her at her friend’s sea-side cottage.

Meanwhile Briony, now 18 and working as a hospital nurse, has grown to accept that what she did to Robbie was based on childhood misperceptions and an outright lie as she recalls that it was chocolatier Paul Marshall who assaulted Lola when she sees a newsreel announcing Paul and Lola’s wedding.

Decades later, a elderly and dying Briony, now a successful novelist, completes her   last novel entitled Atonement as reparations for what she did to Robbie and her sister Cecilia. 

What makes this film stand out as one of the finest human dramas of all time?

Find out!