Atonement

Atonement is so pleasingly old-fashioned that one might believe, save for a few details, that it was up for Best Picture of 1946. One can safely assume that the filmmakers were aiming for the kind of “greatness” that romances of this stripe have attained in the past; in those terms, Atonement has achieved it. Its psychology is no more advanced than that of a Gone with the Wind or Doctor Zhivago or Titanic, but it’s a grand tear-jerker—a high-class chick-flick.

The early scenes, at a stately English manor, are presented as though Gosford Park was decades away. There’s the pristinely-beautiful starlet-lover, Cecelia (Keira Knightley); her Victorian dowager mother; her unappealing, rich fiancé; his foppish, absurdly élitist industrialist-friend; the starlet’s true love, Robbie (James McAvoy), a gentle soul of lesser means who is about to enroll in medical school and prove his worth as a credit to his class; and the starlet’s little sister, Briony (the airy blonde Saoirse Ronan), whose name smells of salt and who pines for Robbie, but is too young and awkward to nab him. All in the span of a day, Robbie accidentally sends Cecelia a letter expounding on his longing for her “cunt,” which Briony reads and is disgusted by. Briony catches Robbie and Cecelia finally consummating their love in the library; later, when Briony sees a man (who we do not see) raping her pre-teen cousin in the woods, she blames the crime on Robbie. He’s sent to prison, and, at the break of World War II, opts to become a soldier instead.

Like Wind or Zhivago or Titanic, the calamity here is but a means of separating our two star-crossed lovers. And, as with those three films, the historical disaster (the Civil War, Russian Revolution and sinking ship, respectively) is reproduced like a technician’s dream: one impressive dolly shot swivels around a war-torn city for minutes. But, even when the camera pulls back to reveal slaughtered schoolgirls stumbled upon by Robbie (meant to evoke, I’m certain, the famous crane shot revealing all the wounded Confederates in Wind), one doesn’t feel too much anti-war fury: Robbie’s perambulations as a soldier never show him any combat, only monumental weariness and the heart-squishing yearning for Cecelia.

Despite its gaudiness, though, the movie is not without feeling; there’s a very sensitive scene at a war hospital in which Briony (now a nurse) speaks to a dying French soldier. He’s missing pieces of his brain, and believes he knows and loves her. A counterpoint to this scene, however, is the incredibly graphic display of battle wounds after a battalion is rushed to the hospital. Like the schoolgirls, this doesn’t show us the horrors of war; it shows us how nasty a makeup job these filmmakers can provide. Why they thought this effect desirable in this movie, I don’t know.

The real innovation of Atonement, I suppose, is that the foci of the romance are not just Cecelia and her Robbie, but Briony the Bitch, as well. The title comes from her lifelong attempts at penance for slandering Robbie—a crime of passion. Guilt and the sultry are prime subjects for a romance novel, and they translate cleanly into this epic spectacle because the writers and the director, Joe Wright (a name not quite as epical as Cecil B. DeMille’s), seem earnest about featuring the pathos, but balance that earnestness with an ability to keep thrusting the plot (through sometimes-confusing flashbacks and forwards) in the same way that Robbie wishes to thrust Cecelia. Unfortunately, as they are such darling sweethearts, that thrust sometimes includes mantras like “Come back to me!” and “This story will resume!” But the cinematography (by Seamus McGarvey) is so classically grandiose that one feels that it’s natural for Pvt. Robbie to run after Cecelia’s truck as it drives away. And McAvoy and Romola Garai (the older Briony, and a good double for Ronan) give their roles an elegant, utterly British intensity. One moment, however, is irreparably campy—a purplish attempt at foreshadowing: through a window, Briony sees an old woman waddle down the street with a cart during an important scene, and the viewer laughs his way right out of the film.

Here’s a question: Why are war romances (not combat movies such as Platoon and Saving Private Ryan) so popular at such queasy times? The Civil War somehow provided pleasurable escape for those about to face World War II, and now, as we are entrenched in Iraq and the War on Terror and cynicism, this throwback goes up for Best Picture. It’s not a question one can satisfactorily answer in a small space; but maybe by making our previous conflicts seem grotesque in a glamorous, fantastical way, and, further, turning them into passionate duologues between two lovely lovers, we feel less troubled by the problems at hand—they devolve to the interpersonal level. Regardless, soggy—sometimes even sloppy and hole-ridden—material like this can make for a compleat guilty pleasure, if not a “great” movie.

Michael Clayton

"Michael Clayton" is a direct descendant of the corruption-themed thrillers of the seventies (such as "Serpico" and "Chinatown"), but it loses nothing in dropping the characteristic downer ending. With the possible exception of "Atonement," which I've still yet to see, "Clayton" is the least arty of the Best Picture nominees (in terms of style--not necessarily substance), but it's terse, slick, exciting and one hell of a polemical. Films like this sometimes go slack and take a pedantic piddle, but this one's tight, bouncy and smart. Tony Gilroy, the writer and director (this is his first go at the latter), has a knack for giving potentially-shopworn sentiments an entertaining kick (such as taking the profusion of anti-lawyer bigotries and turning them into "The Devil's Advocate"). He doesn't disappoint here; he draws out his characters and gives them so much to do in so little time (the movie spans less than a week) that the proficient actors in those parts can't but sparkle--it may be from exhaustion. It certainly looks that way with George Clooney (Clayton), the tired fixer who finally wants out (an old standard, but one that's frenetically enlivened here); he was at one time kindred to the broad hero of "Thank You for Smoking," but has finally crashed to planet earth. His situation is so bad it would be "Kafka-esque" if he had a spare moment to think it through. The only really substantial problem with this movie is that it has too many characters in too many places--some look like others and, though there's a tight Hollywood wrap-up, one's not entirely sure of everybody's affiliation at the end--but that's like saying the movie is too interesting. It doesn't give you the aesthetic thrill ride that "There Will Be Blood" does, but "Clayton" stays blissfully above the speed limit.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a wild ride, but in the end, an unsubstantial one. The movie becomes slack when Raoul Duke/Hunter Thompson (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) go to Vegas for a second round; only bits and pieces match the zingy high of the first half, such as Thompson whipping his battered white Cadillac onto an airport runway, an ether walk (that Gilliam seems to have borrowed from his Monty Python days) and Thompson literally running into himself in San Francisco, 1965. The movie abandons the surreal social satire of the early scenes—the “electric snake” comes chiefly to mind—for not-so-subtle jabs at a square narc officer convention and muddled hoopla about the failure of the sixties and the American dream. This may be effective in the book, but in the movie the sixties spirit seems to have been squashed by meandering drug bingers like Gonzo and, to a lesser degree, Thompson. The fail-safe is that the movie is such a ripped quagmire that it seems to mean something, anyway—particularly if when you view the film, you’re going by its characters’ examples.

Regardless, the initial wackiness is as great as Brazil or 12 Monkeys and maybe even a little bit more disorienting; you literally stumble out of your seat when the movie’s done. And the actors are as willfully cartoonish as the direction. The movie’s decline is not ruinous; it’s merely a comparative letdown.