The lush landscape and sweeping cinematography make this movie gorgeous to look at.  Kiera Knightly is gorgeous and this movie showcases her beauty perfectly, plus her performance surprised me by being so on-point.  She's at her best when she's expressing indignance and anger, and she gets to do that a lot in this movie.  The events that unfold are so unfair and so frustrating that viewers might feel tempted to throw themselves through the screen, and the mystery is intriguing to watch.

Too bad the entire movie is a cop out.  I say that with a hefty helping of my own anger and indignation, because I've been watching trailers for this movie for months now and I was so excited to see it because I wanted to kn ow what was going on.  I've never read the book, but the trailers and TV spots exuded such an air of mystery and intrigue that I was deftly pulled in and couldn't wait to see the movie in theaters.  I'm fully convinced that the only reason I'm as hard on the movie as I plan to be in this review is because I was expecting to much.  At this juncture of my life I should know better than to buy so completely into the hype surrounding a movie, but I couldn't help myself. So where does this movie go so horribly wrong?  I mean, it's not just the sweeping, excruciatingly long tracking shots where we watch characters WALKING for ten minutes at a time with no dialogue and no foreseeable reason for the shot, I'm sure we're supposed to be feeling some emotion, whether loss or sadness or what.

Mostly I was feeling irritation and looking at my watch, wishing the movie were over so I could get this review over with.  I get annoyed when such rookie film student tricks litter a film like this.  Yes, it's pretty cool what you can do with your camera, now can we please return to the action of the movie?  The long agonizing prelude to the war scenes are told from the perspective of a twelve year old girl who has a crush on the gardener who has a crush on her sister.  The twelve year old is jealous.  The older sister doesn't know of the crush.  The man decides to write a letter to inform the older sister of his crush, but his first draft reads like an erotic scene out of the letters section of Hustler magazine, so he re-writes the letter in a much more socially acceptable version and asks the younger sister to deliver the letter. Yes folks, he IS that stupid.  No, even stupider, because he accidentally sends along the sexually-charged letter instead of the revision.

Anyway, that night events erupt, a young girl staying at the house is raped and again the twelve-year-old witnesses the crime and identifies the gardener as the rapist and he's sent away to prison and then forced to fight in the war, but his love for Keira Knightly continues, we know because we see him writing letters to her. If you kept that convoluted mess straight (and I even tried to simplify it from the way it appears in the movie) you already should be able to see how the plot of the movie is only allowed to advance because of a series of annoying coincidences.  The twelve year old just happens to read the letter, just happens to see her older sister and the gardener having sex, just happens to witness the rape... I won't go any further into detail about that "rape" but suffice it to say I'm not convinced that the kid was totally vindictive and acting solely out of jealousy; I think she was simply young and imaginative and misinterpreted everything she saw around her, to the detriment of people who were affected by the things she said.

In the end, she ruined three lives, her sisters, the gardeners, and even her own because she later realized how wrong she was for what she did. Later on in life she sees things that make her realize that she was wrong to identify the gardener as a rapist and she realizes that everything horrible that happened to him was her fault and she must try to "atone" for her actions.  Or something like that.  See, I considered the title of the movie "Atonement" to refer to the man sent away to atone for the crime he didn't commit, but I realized as I watched the movie that the girl who sent him away is the one who realizes she needs to atone for what she did to him and to her sister.  But she doesn't really atone, and after jerking our heart strings and making us think the title of the movie "atonement" was quite appropriate, the movie essentially yells "PSYCHE!  FOOLED YOU" and runs away giggling like a schoolgirl, taking our money with it.  I have a problem with movies that show us something and then tell us "Nope, that was a lie" because the weight of the emotions we've invested following the story deserves better than that.  Or at least it SHOULD.

My issue with this whole mess is threefold.  First, like I said, the story only advances because of a series of coincidences. Second, the movie pulls a cop-out.  Not only does it lie to us, but we find out about the lie at the end when it's revealed that the whole movie has been told through the words of an old woman, the twelve year old girl all grown up and old now, but that kind of framing device doesn't work unless we know from the beginning of the movie that an old person is telling us the story; otherwise it feels tacked-on, like the people making the movie ran out of money and panicked and decided at the last minute to chime in and say "the old woman did it!"  That's as bad as "it was all a dream."  Seriously, even the movie "Titanic" knew better than that; they told us from the beginning that we were listening to the ramblings of an old woman.  My third problem is with the title.  The old woman is telling this story, telling us what happened, as her way of atoning for what she did.  But it's far too late for that now that so many lives have been ruined, so it feels like an empty gesture.  The whole movie is an empty gesture.  It looks pretty and tries to intrigue us and succeeds in getting us excited and curious about what might be wrapped up in its package... but it's a major let-down when we open the package and find ourselves holding an empty box.

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