Adaptation Advance Access originally published online on July 12, 2009
Adaptation 2009 2(2):91-109; doi:10.1093/adaptation/app006
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Foregrounding the Media: Atonement (2007) as an Adaptation
* Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow. E-mail: c.geraghty{at}tfts.arts.gla.ac.uk
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This article uses Joe Wright's 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement to argue that one of the key features of adaptations is the foregrounding of the media. It suggests that this feature is a way of creating a ‘knowing’ audience (as discussed for instance by Hutcheon and Leitch) out of filmgoers who cannot be assumed to have read the original book. The article analyses how Atonement (2007) presents writing, cinema, and television in the three sections of the film and comments on how these media are presented to the audience formally as well as through the complex narrative. It concludes with some comments on the film's ‘happy ending’, suggesting that this foregrounding may, for some viewers, be at the expense of mainstream cinema's traditional investment in emotion.
Key Words: Atonement • adaptation • audience • cinema • melodrama • television
Atonement, the film and the novel, can be considered a dual media success. The 2001 novel maintained Ian McEwan's track record as a successful novelist, winning good reviews, Whitbread and Booker prize nominations and selling well in the United States where it won the prestigious US National Book Critics award in 2003.1 Joe Wright's 2007 adaptation was critically well received, took the best picture awards at the BAFTA and Golden Globes ceremonies and had seven Oscar nominations, all of which helped it to make an impact in the United States where its initial success led to a wider release in a larger number of theatres. The tie-in between book and film was clearly made when the paperback version with the stars of the film on the cover was issued in August 2007. Helped by bookstore promotions connected to the film's release, the paperback sales in September were record breaking:
But the real story this week is the phenomenal performance of Atonement, which sold a combined 58,903 copies across all editions last week. The 53,357 copies of the tie-in edition sold is the highest September weekly sale in the UK since BookScan records began .... Life sales for the title, short-listed for the 2001 Man Booker Prize, have reached more than 900,000 across all editions. It is McEwan's first, and long overdue, number one. (Stone 17)
As we shall see, the critical response to the film on its initial release was framed by a comparison with the successful book. In this article, I will first examine this response to see how it was shaped by the filmmakers and their publicity activity. In turning to my analysis of the film, however, I want to move away from the specific comparison between book and film which was the starting point for many of the reviewers. In doing so, I want to discuss the film in its own right, not as ‘another version of Briony's novel’ (Childs 152) or indeed of McEwan’s, and to analyse how Atonement (2007) establishes and reflects on its own status as an adaptation. This section of the essay begins by laying out some of the general principles of adaptation studies which are pertinent here. It moves on to a discussion of the way in which Atonement (2007) uses media representation as a specific means of calling attention to its status as an adaptation. The essay concludes with some comments on the vexed question of the ‘happy ending’.
The film was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2007 and it got further festival appearances and national releases throughout the autumn and winter. Film critics in the press and online made it clear that the film's handling of the process of adaptation was important to their judgements on the film. This was as true of the trade press and popular journals as it was of the broadsheet critics and these reviewers were largely picking up on the emphasis on the film's status as an adaptation which had been established in the publicity interviews given by those involved in making the film who referred respectfully to the importance and stature of McEwan's book. In particular, Joe Wright, who took over as director from Richard Eyre in 2006, emphasized that he had found answers to some of the problems of the screenplay he was offered by returning to the novel:
So we started again, and what I was interested in doing was a very faithful adaptation to the book. We literally kept the book on one side and the script on the other and we slowly worked through it, and that's how we came up with it. (Douglas)
From Venice, Variety reported that the film ‘preserves much of the tome's metaphysical depth and all of its emotional power’ and noted that ‘Atonement is immensely faithful to McEwan's novel’ (Elley).2 Screen International suggested that it was ‘a textbook example of literary adaptation’ (Hunter) and Hollywood Reporter that ‘McEwan's best-selling novel ... had been rendered so well ... that it ranks with the best novel adaptations of recent times’ (Bennett). Helen O’Hara, reviewing the film for the populist UK film magazine Empire, began by jokingly reminding her readers,
you know the book. If you use public transport, you’ll recognize it as the one everyone was reading circa 2004. There was the Booker shortlisting, the reams of laudatory articles about its author Ian McEwan. And now arrives the inevitable film adaptation ...In Village Voice, Ella Taylor demonstrated her credentials for reviewing the film by beginning her article with ‘Re-reading Ian McEwan's Atonement last weekend, my first thought was I hope to God that Joe Wright ... doesn’t screw up this wonderful novel’.3
In general, the reviews, in particular the favourable ones, suggest that critics were not looking for complete faithfulness in the adaptation but the retention of the book's themes and structure and a sense that the film is doing the novel justice. O’Hara concluded that the film was ‘an adaptation at least as good as the novel—complex, delicate and devastating’. Kenneth Turan in LA Times wrote that ‘this is one of the few adaptations that gives a splendid novel the film it deserves’ while Philip French commented that ‘Ian McEwan's novel has been brought thrillingly to the screen’. Peter Bradshaw began his Guardian review by implying that he had had his doubts which had been triumphantly overcome:
Well, Hampton and director Joe Wright have certainly done McEwan proud with this lavish and spectacular screen version: they are really thinking big, in every sense, and the result is exhilarating.
The reviews of Atonement (2007) thus sought to establish the relationship between book and film as important for critical assessment. But many of them also used other references which were again taken from the publicity material promoting the film. Wright had discussed his love of old films (‘I was brought up on films like Brief Encounter’ he told The Daily Telegraph [Gritten 33]) and reviewers took their cue, particularly when it came to discussing the acting. Variety, in its characteristic movie-speak, commented that Keira Knightley ‘proves every bit as magnetic as the divas of those classic mellers [melodramas] pic consciously references’ and that generally the film ‘consciously evokes the acting conventions and romantic cliches of ’30s/’40s melodramas’ (Elley). Screen International commended James McAvoy for ‘a flawless upper crust English accent’ and ‘the look and screen presence of a 1930s matinee idol like Laurence Olivier or Robert Donat’ while Knightley revealed an ‘inner steel beneath her cut-glass accent and Celia Johnson-style gentility’ (Hunter). Critics cited films from other periods including Gosford Park and Saving Private Ryan (the Dunkirk sequence). Nick Bradshaw, in the specialist BFI journal, Sight and Sound, added a number of others including The Go-Between, A Passage to India, and The Remains of the Day and commented that ‘as McEwan offered a digest of his literary heritage, so the film embraces all those literary adaptations’ (49).
For some, the self-consciousness of this referencing did not save the film from falling into melodrama: the generally supportive Philip French referred back to the book to suggest that ‘without McEwan's subtle prose and the astute authorial observations, the film at times verges on the melodramatic’ while Taylor complains that Wright has turned the first part of the novel into ‘just enough of a bodice ripper to reel in the youth market’ and the second half into ‘a cheap knockoff of a 1940s war movie’. This sense that the film's referencing of melodrama causes problems can also be seen in Peter Childs’ sympathetic review of the film in Adaptation. He suggests that the film shares with the novel an emphasis on different perspectives and that this draws attention to ‘the film's status as adaptation, a visually realized rendition of Briony's final but fateful "version" of events’ (151). Nevertheless, Childs finally finds the film to lack the novel's complexity: ‘the projected fantasy of Robbie and Cecilia as lovers ... bringing Christopher Hampton's in-many-ways fine adaptation to a clichéd romantic closure’. In addition, the film cannot deal with the ‘postmodern twist in the novel’ and fails to ‘explain or explore’ its own status as yet another version of Briony's novel (152).
It is clear then that the critical context for Atonement (2007), created as least in part by its own publicity machine, involves the film's relationship with two kinds of source text—the original novel and the various films consciously referenced. Note though that although the critics continually refer to the book, they also indicate that neither they nor the filmmakers can assume that those interested in seeing the film have read the book. Critics take their usual care not to give away too much of the plot; French, for instance, writes that ‘The ending has been considerably altered, but Hampton's clever solution will surprise those who haven’t read the novel and is unlikely to disappoint those who have’. O’Hara in Empire reminds her readers about the novel not by assuming that they have read it but that they have seen someone else reading it. In Sight and Sound, David Jays begins a feature article on the film by remembering that ‘in the summer of 2001 I was repeatedly told I ought to read Ian McEwan's "Atonement"’ and warns his readers ‘to look away if you’d like to experience the same jolt as either a reader of the novel or as a viewer of Joe Wright's new film’ (34). Atonement is not therefore a classic like Oliver Twist or Pride and Prejudice, known from a number of different versions in a variety of media. Nor does it have the status of the Harry Potter series or Lord of the Rings, books which were adapted with ‘exceptional fidelity’ (Leitch, Adaptation and its Discontents 127) because of the anxiety about taking any liberties to which their loyal and knowledgeable fans might object. For Wright and Hampton, the original source is clearly important but they cannot assume previous knowledge on the part of the audience and, indeed, their concern about the changes they made to the ending indicates again that for at least some of the audience it will be a ‘revelation’.4 In the critical discourse established by the film's publicity and the critics, the novel is clearly established as a source text but knowledge of its contents is limited and the film needs to appeal to an audience well beyond the original readers. It is the implications of this that I want to explore in my analysis of the film.
The fidelity model, which relies heavily on notions of media specificity and which almost inevitably results in a comparison on terms dictated by the source text, has been under attack for many years in adaptation studies though it still persists as a default mode. Philosophically unsustainable and often sterile in terms of the readings it offers, the fidelity model has been particularly unhelpful in making judgements about popular cinema. Those making the comparison between page and screen seem consciously or unconsciously to draw on a hierarchy of values which is at odds with the practices of popular cinema. Robert Stam, among others, has drawn attention to the value structure which underpins such an approach with its problematic response to cultural products such as film and television which appear to rely on the image rather than the word, on the generation of emotion and sensation in the viewer and on mass audiences rather than the individual reader. To his list, I would add that this value structure also often relies on the contrast between (apparently) non-generic written texts and generic screen adaptations. Childs is not alone in commenting on the point when an adaptation falls in to romance or melodrama and judging that to be a betrayal of the original source.
Of course, the problems of the fidelity model were supposed to be overcome by ‘the impact of the posts’ (Stam, "Introduction" 8). It has to be said that the post-structural emphasis on intertextuality, dialogism, and cross-cultural referencing has not led to demise of the comparison between adaptation and source text. It has proved remarkably difficult to escape from this automatic act of comparison—hence, as I have argued more fully elsewhere, my deliberate act of abandoning the source to focus on the adaptation itself.5 But this post-structural emphasis, in seeking to throw out the hierarchical values of the fidelity model, runs the risk of also throwing out the notion of an adaptation altogether. If the notion of an original source with an overdetermining author is dropped, if all texts depend on an interplay of cultural references and sources, if collage rather than écriture is the dominant mode of writing, then all texts are ‘caught up in an ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’ (Stam, "Beyond Fidelity" 66). Adaptation studies would then fold back into a much broader interdisciplinary approach which took intermedia possibilities for granted: ‘in the workings of the human imagination, adaptation is the norm, not the exception’ (Hutcheon 177).
Something similar might be said about approaches which seem to draw more fully from cultural studies and which emphasize context and a more grounded sense of identity. One feature of recent adaptation studies has been the expansion into different kinds of sources such as memoirs, biography, newspaper articles, and historical documents. This is a welcome extension of boundaries but inevitably it blurs the distinction between an analysis based on modes of adaptation and one coming out of cultural studies more generally. Alessandro Raengo's very interesting article, for instance, analyses the body image of baseball star, Jackie Robinson. She argues that the success of various artefacts, including a film and book of his life, is dependent on Robinson as ‘the only individual who can embody it’ (79). Adopting the ‘traditional language’ of adaptation studies, she suggests that ‘Robinson's body provides both the "source material" and its "adaptation"’ (80). As with Stam's use of intertextuality, this move engages adaptation theory with a potentially more productive model of analysis but perhaps at the expense of precision.
I would want to argue that adaptation is still a worthwhile category with distinctive features that can be analysed. An adaptation is an adaptation not just because it is based on an original source but because it draws attention to the fact of adaptation in the text itself and/or in the paratextual material which surrounds it. Rather than rejecting adaptations as almost inevitably different and therefore worse than their sources, a number of critics have set out to ask ‘what is the appeal of adaptations?’ (Hutcheon 172). While I do not necessarily agree with Leitch's recent argument that adaptation is best considered as a genre, his emphasis on the distinctive pleasures of adaptations is helpful. Arguing that all reading or viewing involves the testing of ‘earlier experiences of books or plays or films against a new set of norms and values’ offered by the current work, he suggests that the distinctive pleasure of adaptation lies in the way it ‘foregrounds this possibility and makes it more active, more exigent, more indispensable’ (Leitch, "Adaptation, the Genre" 117).
Leitch draws on Hutcheon's description of readers oscillating between one text and another. Hutcheon indeed suggests that ‘to experience [an adaptation] as an adaptation, ... we need to recognise it as such and to know its adapted text, thus allowing the latter to oscillate in our memories with what we are experiencing’ (120–21, original emphasis). This suggests once again that an adaptation is dependent on its source and Hutcheon indeed speaks of adapters who ‘rely’ on the audiences’ ability to ‘fill in the gaps’ through information from the adapted text. But she also indicates that there are audience members who have no ‘reference to and foreknowledge of the adapted text’ and argues that ‘for an adaptation to be successful in its own right, it must be so for both knowing and unknowing audiences’ (121). I would suggest that rather than depending on such variable foreknowledge, it is better to think of an adaptation as independent (to the same extent as other texts) with the fact of adaptation recognizable from its own formal qualities. This allows us to rely less on speculations about what the audience actually does and to look for signifiers within the text which invite the oscillation described by Leitch and Hutcheon. I would suggest that these often involve a layering of narratives, performances, and/or settings in which one way of telling a story is set against another. Such a layering is often indicated by the foregrounding of media signifiers which invite the audience to set one media experience against another, just as the process of adaptation involves shifting from one mode of media production to the other. The effect is one of shadowing that shift in production by offering recognition of a parallel shift in perception. The advantage, though, is that while the shift in production may rely on our knowledge of the fact of adaptation (and in Hutcheon's terms may be available only to the ‘knowing audience’), the foregrounding of a shift in perception can lie entirely within the adaptation text itself and is therefore available to knowing and unknowing audiences alike.
One of the features of Leitch's proposed genre of adaptation is an ‘obsession with authors, books and words’ ("Adaptation, the Genre" 112) which, one might note, works against the traditional association of film and image made in much adaptation theory and commonsense criticism. He suggests a number of different ways in which this can be done including featuring the author's name along with the book's title in the film title, the use of the physical properties of books in the credits (the fluttering pages, the frontispiece), and the books featured in plotlines. One could also add the use of a writer as an investigator in a story and the fact of publication as the source of a happy ending. Atonement (2007), as we shall see, not only draws heavily on writing but it also references a wide variety of other media from opera to newsreels. In this analysis, I will focus on the film's foregrounding of the three media—writing, film, and television—which it uses to tell its story and which it invites the audience to reflect on in establishing a somewhat unusual media hierarchy. I suggest that these different modes dominate the three sections of the film which are also marked by a change in the actress playing Briony—the events at the Tallis country home, the wartime sequences and the coda in which the older Briony reflects on what she has done. Of course, the film deploys the mechanisms and formal devices of cinema throughout; the foregrounding of the media in different sections precisely invites us to oscillate from that base into an awareness of other modes of storytelling. The film opens with two acts of writing which are rendered inseparable. The first occurs in the credits. We hear first birdsong and then the sounds of a typewriter being loaded, the carriage being moved across, and the sound of the keys hitting the drum as against a black background the underlined letters of the word ATONEMENT appear in huge close-up on the screen. This typing provides us with the film's title and can be tied later to Briony's novel but it is not what we find in the first scene in which the child Briony is revealed to be typing at her desk. Shots of her back and face and eyes alternate with those which show the typewriter as the camera moves up the keys to the manuscript where THE END is being written (Figure 1). Briony takes the sheet out of the typewriter and puts it on the pile of papers which she turns to show the second title THE TRIALS OF ARABELLA. It seems that the end of one story is the beginning of another, as Briony marches off to announce her success to her mother, the rhythm of her walk matching the staccato music that incorporates the sound of typing. What is less clear is whether the typing of the title can also be ascribed to Briony later in life or whether this is the personless objectivity of the film imposing its authority.
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Writing then is established as Briony's activity and will be referred to throughout the film when for example she begins to write her first version of the lovers’ story while training at St Thomas's Hospital in the wartime sequences. As in many adaptations, the writer is presented in some ways not only as the author of what we see but also as a potentially unreliable witness. In two crucial scenes, both seen first from Briony's perspective, she gets it wrong; her view is limited and impaired, the conclusions she draws lack evidence. By contrast, the film invites us to believe the truth of the scenes as fully rendered by cinema, without the intervention of the writer. As is sometimes the case in cinematic renderings of writing, the young author is rendered as fallible and limited. This is reinforced by the settled nature of the generic references at this point. The film's rendering of the English country house can be understood almost as a subgenre of the period film; as in the most recent successful precursor Gosford Park, the settled hierarchies and the beautiful landscapes are meticulously presented as desirable but doomed.
But, as the film progresses, it is writing which disrupts the conventions of cinematic genre to make the medium (as opposed to the author) powerful. Briony is writing a play at this point, not a novel, and in the early scenes, the mise-en-scène of the film plays with setting and scale to underline the theatricality of the country house setting and the 1930s dialogue. The first shot in the house is of its doll's house replica and as the camera pulls back, a line of assorted animals, the contents of a farm set, and a Noah's ark comes into view as if marching silently towards Briony.
Later on we get a similar shot of the house, this time the real one (Figure 2), followed by a shot from above of Briony and Cecilia as tiny figures lying on the lawn. Throughout the country house section, the actors are often posed picturesquely into groups or set against a striking piece of furniture. Briony's act of writing for theatre for the first time also allows her dialogue which reflects on the problems of play production; whereas a novel creates setting through word and the reader's imagination, a play, she complains, depends on other people, the actors. In this analysis of media specificities, cinema's possibilities remain evident but unspoken.
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In this section of the film, words do not act simply as signifiers for some imaginative signified. The most powerful words are unspoken and appear as writing, typed on the page, and as cinema, in huge close-ups. Here the two media combine together to convey the power of the word. Robbie's letter writing to Cecilia is introduced by Briony's voice-over as she scribbles the words into her notebook: ‘he was the most dangerous man in the world’. The following scene alternates shots of Robbie at the typewriter with those of Cecilia getting ready for dinner, held together by the diegetic sounds of opera played on Robbie's record player. She is all image, her face and body reflected in the mirrors and blurred by feathers, cigarette smoke, and light. Robbie too is on display; his shoulders are bared and he stretches his leg out in an athletic pose between drafts. But his focus is on the words. Initially, the words are voiced; Robbie reads them aloud and then mutters them more softly as he redrafts. As the aria reaches the top notes, a huge close-up shows the black letters as they are typed onto the soft texture of the paper, ending with a forceful full stop (Figure 3). We are forced to follow the sentence as it is created as if the processes of writing by the character and reading by the audience were becoming one. Then, as Robbie breaks the tension by laughing, the writing process returns to the character/author. He changes to a pen and reads aloud the ‘more formal’, ‘less anatomical’ version of what he wants to say. But the shock of reading the writing returns when Briony reads the letter. We see her face in two shots from below as she reads so the content of the letter is hidden and we wait for her reaction. But the audience is again directly confronted with writing as, in a close-up, the word ‘cunt’ is not only read by Briony but also rewritten letter by letter. A long shot of Briony standing small and still in the hall returns us to cinema.
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The letter does its powerful work, both in allowing the release of sexual feeling by Robbie and Cecilia and confirming Briony's belief that he is a dangerous man. Her misidentification of Robbie as Lola's rapist leads to his arrest. There is a clue as to the continuing source of the story in that the country house section ends with a close-up of Briony looking down at Robbie's arrest with the sound of typewriting getting louder on the soundtrack. Writing, in the form of Briony's stories and the lovers’ letters, continues to be important in the telling of the story but with the shift to 1940, the emphasis on it as a medium recedes. Briony's writing is mainly discussed, rather than seen on screen, and the love letters are largely handled through the cinematic device of voice-overs. The wartime sequences are dominated by the foregrounding of cinema and an emphasis on its medium specificity.
The wartime section of the film can be divided into two parts: the first, taking us up to what is in fact Robbie's death at Dunkirk is dominated by his viewpoint and the second by Briony's as she begins her training as a nurse and tries to make amends for her actions. The 1935 section of the film presented the audience with a series of theatrical scenes taking place in chronological order on the set of a country house but the wartime section cuts between different spaces with gaps in time indicated by dissolves, intertitles, and montage. In addition, the concentration on the triangle of Robbie, Cecilia, and Briony which dominated the first section of the film slips a little as the film extends its range of locations and other lives are briefly seen: Robbie's soldier companions; the French men who bring them food and drink; the dying French soldier who mistakes Briony for an English girl he knew before the war; the mother and children being evacuated ‘to the country’; and the bent, elderly woman pushing a low pram as she makes her slow way along a London street. Their stories are hinted at rather than told but they refer back to the way British cinema of the 1940s based its approach on interweaving stories from people of different communities.
The foregrounding of cinema in this section is effected in a number of ways. There are references to the cinema of the period, the so-called golden age of the 1940s when British cinema found its story and the need to tell it. There is for example the inclusion of documentary footage from ‘the epic of Dunkirk’ featuring soldiers packed into trains and downing cups of tea, with the emphasis on dogged resistance rather than hope of victory; this contrasts with the false optimism of the mock newsreel which shows the Queen visiting a chocolate factory which alerts Briony to Lola's forthcoming marriage. Other references are less direct though still clear: the scene of Robbie and Cecilia meeting in the tea room before he embarks recalls Brief Encounter with its restrained lovers, speaking in clipped accents in public places (see Figures 4 and 5 for a comparison); the ferris wheel from The Third Man dominates the skyline on the beach (Figures 6 and 7); the soundtrack uses hymns and popular songs to demonstrate public spirit in the manner of Millions Like Us (Figures 8 and 9). Also familiar from the films of the period are the wartime settings: these include the crowded hospital wards in which the stories of nurses and patients are overridden by public events; the London streets with their buses, post boxes, and crowded pavements; the cramped terraces and rundown rooms occupied by the working class who attempt to continue their everyday life; the church architecture which includes the church in which Briony sees Lola marry and the rose window at Dunkirk which, like the church in The Bells Go Down, still stands amid the ruins (Figures 10 and 11).
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But it is not just the subject matter which foregrounds cinema but also the form. In this section, the film demonstrates its cinematic virtuosity and draws attention to the way in which cinema has been used specifically to make relationships across space and time. Certain elements are clearly brought to the fore: the five-minute steadicam shot of the Dunkirk beach was commented on by the critics and the subject of technical analysis in a number of interviews.6 There are other examples of this drawing attention to form. The steadicam shot is followed by the scene in the cinema when Robbie, in pursuit of water, gets himself behind the screen as Le Quai des Brumes plays, his small figure pushed to one side by the huge faces of the stars which move together into a kiss; the distortion and the glamour of the cinema is clearly figured (Figure 12). And Robbie's death is presaged by a swift montage of shots summing up his life which includes a reprise of his arrest in which for the first time we hear the words which Cecilia said to him as the police took him away. These major effects stand out. They ask to be looked at and admired rather than subsumed into the oft-cited emphasis on realism of British cinema in which the audience is invited to look through rather than at the screen.
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In this second section, the foregrounding of cinematic devices also involves the interweaving of time and uncertainty about viewpoint. The use of voice-over, flashbacks, and ‘false’ shots of, for example, Robbie's mother at Dunkirk emphasizes cinema's association with memories, dreams, and visions. On the walk to Dunkirk, the sight of the dead schoolgirls laid out in the grass has the slightly surrealistic quality of a dream. And even what looks like solid realism is not necessarily to be trusted. Briony's visit to her sister takes place in a cramped room with its net curtains, boiling kettle, and milk in a bottle. It is a realist, urban scene familiar, for instance, from Ealing Studio's postwar films such as It Always Rains on Sunday and Dance Hall. But the speed of Robbie's slide past Briony in the cramped room, the intensity of her gaze through the doorway at the luminous sheets on the unmade bed and Cecilia's intense plea to Robbie—‘Come back, come back to me’—indicate that all is not what it seems. We will later learn that this scene never took place.
At the end of this imagined scene, Robbie tells Briony that she is to ‘write it all down, just the truth—no rhymes, no embellishments, no adjectives’. This suggests that writing can tell the truth in a way that cinema cannot and Robbie's words are followed by a shot of Briony on the train, apparently returning from her visit. This shot, which gradually moves into a close-up of her face, rhymes with the shot of Briony which ended the country house section; again, the percussion of the typewriter is on the soundtrack but this time the flickering lights on Briony's face also refer to the specificity of cinema and the movement of film through a projector. However, as the film moves into the third section, it is clear that television is the medium through which truth will be told. The screen goes black and we hear a voice saying ‘I’m sorry, could we stop for a moment?’. Multiple television screens fill the screen and reveal an elderly woman as the source of the voice; her words and the accompanying movement are replayed as the film establishes the setting of Briony's interview in a television studio (Figure 13). A brief scene of Briony composing herself in her dressing room gives us her face in the mirror and in the television interview which follows the camera gradually moves from a full shot of her seated, taken from behind the interviewer, through a head and shoulders shot which is held as she recounts her commitment to truth (‘I got firsthand accounts’, ‘In fact, what happened’) before coming in for a tight close-up for her explanation of why the book is not in fact the truth but ‘a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.’ This camera positioning is not of course typical of a standard television interview but, in its gradual homing into a close-up and its concentration on an unglamourized, elderly face in which we can see fleeting emotions, it gives us a version of television, a version in which an interview can unexpectedly get at truth (Figure 14).7 As it has done with theatre, writing, and cinema itself, Atonement (2007) alerts the audience to the characteristics of this medium and rather unexpectedly reverses the usual cultural hierarchies in which literature is deemed a more serious and hence a better medium than cinema and cinema better than television. Here, the mechanics of television are emphasized through the rewinding and repetition but television is acknowledged as a source of truth, both about Briony, Robbie, and Cecilia and about Briony's book.
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Although the film retains the book's emphasis on Briony's inventive powers in elaborating a happy ending, it takes on a different resonance if we pay attention to the foregrounding of the media in this adaptation. The final shots show Robbie and Cecilia on the beach and then returning to the cottage where we leave them. Childs sees this as a clichéd romantic ending but it is more accurate to see it as Atonement’s (2007) return to the mode of cinema. The audience is now, in Hutcheon's terms, a ‘knowing’ one, not because it has read the book but because it has watched this film. The ending is layered over the knowledge we have gained both about the story and the mode of telling. It is shot using the clichés associated with wartime love stories. The white cliffs of Dover shine in the background, the lovers playfully wrestle in a manner which represents the sexual activity banished from the screen in the 1940s, and the house is perfectly positioned in its natural surroundings, far from the urban threat of bombed cities. In many war films, these kinds of images were used to signify what was being fought for, a particular version of England in which personal relationships and national identity came together into a desired unity. The final shot is, of course, the shot from Cecilia's photograph, now given movement and hence, in cinema's terms, life. It is literally picture perfect and made so, this time, by the mechanisms of cinema; Robbie, and Cecilia are safely inside. Romantic endings in cinema often have this imposed quality as if the required resolution can only be achieved by ignoring the unresolved aspects of the trouble that melodrama uses as the basis for stories. This is a happy ending in which the mechanics of cinema are exposed (Figure 15). If television emerges from Atonement (2007) as the medium in which truth can be told, then the ending establishes cinema as the place where we can knowingly respond to a different kind of emotional investment, the investment in desire that mass audiences have traditionally made in cinema.
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In suggesting that the ending needs to be looked at in the light of the film's layering of different media, I am not suggesting that the ending works entirely successfully but that its problems are not a question of a lapse into cliché. First of all, the ending closes on a representation of cinema which, however knowingly expressed, may be too locked into a version of cinema which is ‘forever sepia’ (Taylor). Atonement (2007) potentially offers a double view of cinema as a medium. It seeks to establish itself as a modern film capable of handling the postmodern challenge of its source but the ending runs the risk of setting up the 1940s version of British cinema invoked in the wartime sequences as the dominant way of defining cinema as a medium, at least for audiences of British films, and thus making it nostalgic, old fashioned, or irrelevant.
Secondly, and this may indicate a more general risk run by certain kinds of adaptations, Atonement (2007) illustrates that the layering which encourages the oscillation between different versions of the text and thus encourages the reading practices which Hutcheon describes can distance us from the emotional identification often assumed to be necessary for cinema. Its ending, with its emphasis not only on Briony's telling of the story but also on the specificity of cinema, more generally invites us to stand back from the central relationship and to become aware of the processes of telling which we have been through. David Jay found the film ‘tense but chilly’ (35) and Anthony Lane associated this coldness with the exposition of its own mechanics. He suggests that the steadicam sequence at Dunkirk
has been lauded for its skill, yet something feels wrong. You find yourself marking off the surreal details as they are ushered into view ... Wright is sowing the frame with incident for fear that it might lie fallow, and the result is that he risks merely drawing attention to his own style. This ties in with a general suspicion that ‘Atonement,’ as a story about stories, may be too self-conscious for its own good. You have to admire it, when so much of the competition seems inane and slack, but you can’t help wondering, with some impatience, what happened to its heart.Lane goes on to link this emphasis on style to the way that the ending—Briony's ‘last, beneficent lie’—‘made me look back over the expanse of the film and realize, to my dismay, that I hardly believed a word of it’; in particular, he found that he did not ‘believe in the force of his [Robbie’s] love for Cecilia, or of hers for him’. Lane finds himself distanced from the heart of the film not just by the themes of its source but also by the way it draws attention to its own processes, its emphasis on the devices of cinema or more broadly, as I have suggested, the emphasis on the medium of telling, whether it be writing, cinema, or television.
In this article, I have sought to analyse Atonement (2007) as an adaptation which draws attention to its status as an adaptation by foregrounding the use of different media. I am not arguing that these media do have specific and intrinsic representational practices but that the film presents them as such and associates them with different kinds of truths. In an article on postmodernism and adaptation, Peter Brooker shifted attention from the text to the audience and argued that a movement from source to adaptation (the path followed by the makers of Atonement [2007], for instance) cannot be assumed on the part of the audience and that there are therefore ‘variations in the viewer's experience’ (118). From this, he deduced ‘two simple points: that the source text may not be the chronologically first text in a reader's or viewer's experience; and, secondly, that an "adaptation" may not be experienced as this’ (118–9). From this, he argued that ‘adaptations ... wait to be realized’ and that their ‘intertextual and transtextual meanings are inactive, manifest, or potential’, dependent on the viewer's knowledge of the ‘before and after’ of a particular work. My argument, using Atonement (2007) as an example, is that the process is more dynamic for adaptations which seek to be recognized as adaptations. This film does not wait for the unknowing viewer to go away and read the book. The possibility of comparison is not only put in the foreground (Leitch, "Adaptation, the Genre" 117) but is also a necessary part of engagement with the film. Following its narrative depends on an oscillation between different versions of the story and its telling which are available in the film itself. McEwan's novel offered a particularly good opportunity for this kind of reworking but it is the film's own representation of different media which makes it an adaptation to be understood as an adaptation. What Lane's review suggests, however, is that this may be at the expense of a characteristic strongly associated with mainstream cinema—its traditional ability to make the audience feel what it might mean to experience enduring love.
FILMOGRAPHY
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Ideas for this article were initially presented at the Literature on Screen conference at the University of Amsterdam, 2008 and I am very grateful to the other members of the panel, Laurent Mellet and Terry Kidner, and to those who attended and joined in a spirited discussion.
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1 See Finney for an account of the critical response to the book and an indication of how the novel changed the assessment of McEwan's overall stature: ‘Atonement has been greeted by most book critics as a masterpiece that unexpectedly stayed at the top of the best seller lists of the New York Times for many weeks. Almost all American reviewers of the book have given it the highest praise possible’ (69). When it was released, the DVD cover linked it to the paperback book as well as the film.
2 Where no page number is given, the quotation is taken from a review in an online version of the newspaper or periodical.
3 The emphasis on the process of adaptation continued on the DVD which had a special feature entitled ‘Novel to the Screen’ and included interview material with Christopher Hampton and Ian McEwan.
4 Christopher Hampton commented that ‘We spent more time on how to do that revelation at the end than on absolutely anything else. It's so delicate. And it could go so drastically wrong if you didn’t pay tremendous attention to it.’ (Winship)
5 See Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture, for a further discussion of this approach.
6 See, for instance, interviews with Wright by Edward Douglas at ComingSoon.net and Rob Carnevale at indielondon.co.uk and the report by Martyn Palmer in The Times Magazine.
7 Hampton (‘Secrets and Lies’) in a discussion of this scene referred to the television interview Dennis Potter gave at the end of his life but one could go back to John Freeman making Gilbert Harding cry in Face to Face (BBC/1960) and David Frost's confessional interviews with Richard Nixon (1977) as examples which established the use of television in this way.
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Bradshaw Nick. "Atonement." Sight and Sound, (Oct. 2007) 17:49.
Bradshaw Peter. "Atonement." The Guardian. 7 Sept. 2007.
Brooker Peter. "Postmodern Adaptation: Pastiche, Intertextuality and Re-functioning." In: The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen—Cartmell Deborah, Whelehan Imelda, eds. (2007) Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 107–20.
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Childs Peter. "Atonement—The Surface of Things." Adaptation (2008) 1.2:151–2.
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———. Film Adaptation and its Discontents (2007) Baltimore: John Hopkins UP.
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———. "Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation." In: Literature and Film: A Guide to Theory and Practice of Adaptation—Stam Robert, Raengo Alessandra, eds. (2004) Oxford: Blackwell. 1–52.
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Atonement. Dir. Joe Wright. UK/France. 2007.
The Bells Go Down. Dir. Basil Dearden. UK. 1943.
Brief Encounter. Dir. David Lean. UK. 1945.
Dance Hall. Dir. Charles Chrichton. UK. 1950.
The Go-Between. Dir. Joseph Losey. UK. 1970.
Gosford Park. Dir. Robert Altman. USA/UK/Italy. 2001.
It Always Rains on Sunday. Dir. Robert Hamer. UK. 1948.
Millions Like Us. Dir. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. UK. 1943.
A Passage to India. Dir. David Lean. UK/USA. 1984.
Le Quai des Brumes. Dir. Marcel Carne. France. 1938.
The Remains of the Day. Dir. James Ivory. UK. 1993.
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