Aggravated by "Atonement"

Sunday, 9th September 2007

Yet another bad night at the cinema... Now, as I hinted yesterday, I went to the new Film Of The Moment with expectations carefully lowered, thinking "Look, it's probably not as good as the hype merchants claim, but give it a chance, and there may be surprises in the details." Yet after twenty minutes, my heart was sinking, and by the time the lights came on, you could almost hear my teeth grinding.

I thought it was melodramatic, and laughably pretentious at times, the characters no more than ciphers and the direction full of pointlessly lavish cinematographer's boilerplate. Mills & Boon masquerading as High Art. Relentlessly intrusive music, too. And there was quite a bit of laughter from the art-house audience during the laborious bonking episode in the library.

Yet I pick up three broadsheets this morning, and see three straight raves. (I agree with the Observer's Philip French about the touching deathbed scene, but that's as far as it goes.) Where am I going wrong? I suppose the obvious response is that I haven't read the novel. But what could such a threadbare screenplay bring to the story that wasn't already in the text? I'm baffled. I don't know what to make of the fuss about Keira Knightley either.The good points? Well, James McAvoy has real charisma, and it's quite a bit shorter than The English Patient, a movie to which it bears an unfortunate resemblance.

I'm interested to see what Norm Geras - a fan of the book - makes of it all. In the meantime, I'm so out of step with the critics again that I wonder if I just don't understand modern film grammar. Everything - from the trailers to the background sound and the visuals - seems to rely more and more on movieplex bombast. It's like turning Edith Wharton into a cartoon strip.