Atonement

A feast for the eyes, ears, and emotions; meticulously controlled and stylized to the point of being overbearing, but it courts those lines rather than crosses them. Wright has come a long way since Pride & Prejudice, bringing plenty of style to it: Ian McEwan’s novel supplies the substance, and this does credit to his weaving and retreating metanarrative. Dario Marianelli’s exceptionally moving score adds a whole new level to it, incorporating typewriters and other on-screen images into the melody, sometimes finding a perfectly background piano theme coming from a character’s hands. This is an exercise in self-flagellation more than a romance, and if you’ve heard talk of the ending don’t build it up in your mind as a huge revelation or twist. It is a masterpiece of simplicity, of peeling off the final layer, of one character’s arrival at clarity, and at bottom a statement about narrative fiction.

At any rate, a rapturous experience for me, deserving of its awards and awfully underrated here; my #2 for the year so far.