MikePadgett.com

• Director: Joe Wright
• United Kingdom, 2007
• 

When a young girl uses a series of events to doom the romance of the housekeeper’s son and her elder sister, the course of each of their lives is changed beyond foresight. So goes the story of Atonement, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s manipulative novel by upcoming British director Joe Wright.

Whilst the first act concentrates on the minute tensions of a pre-war country residence, the remaining drama unfolds on a much broader and more popular canvas set among the young nurses of London’s war effort and the British Expeditionary Force’s evacuation of Dunkirk.

Though our three protagonists comfortably succeed in displacing themselves to a new time and place, the film as a whole still feels unbalanced when detailed portraits are swapped for sweeping landscapes. When all is finally explained with a typical McEwan twist in the dénouement, this beautifully shot, seriously acted film rather struggles for credibility like a swan taking flight.

• Director: James Ivory
• United Kingdom, 1992
• 

There’s something grating about the bourgeois self-sufficiency of the upper middle class during Forster’s era, as it sits around babbling blithely about suffrage and philosophy. Yet for all its self-professed modernism, it took two World Wars to truly change the character of English society.

Nevertheless, Forster is documenting progress here and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay is sharp enough to navigate the material with enough sensitivity and distinction between the three families.

Elsewhere, the locations are formidably rich and well photographed, a feature typical of all Merchant Ivory productions. And defying the otherwise sagging middle section of the film, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson bring fizz to their scenes together, prefacing their brilliance in Ivory’s next and more accomplished effort The Remains Of The Day.