The film opens on a wealthy family living in a large estate. It's an idyllic, beautiful place that reminds me of Austenesque stories set in the century before this story takes place. There is a romance on the cusp of becoming realized and if you didn't know anything about the story that comes, you would think the film would be limited to a romantic drama about a weathly girl and her love affair with a servant's son. (A couple I ship WHOLE HEARTEDLY within the first few minutes.) This is where Atonement subverts the romance genre. This idyllic place also leads a smart, creative girl to keep herself occupied in her own imagination. She's always writing or telling a story even if it's in her own head which is reflected by the clacking of a typewriter in the score that accompanies Briony. This imagination leads to a lie that forces our romantic leads apart and changes everyone's lives.

Then our romantic drama becomes a much darker war drama, while still keeping the thread of the central romance intact. Years later, Cecilia and Robbie meet in London before Robbie heads to war. They are going to be together when the war is over. They write to each other and Robbie reads Cecilia's letters over and over and remembers Cecilia's request that he come back to her. This is where we get another genre element that I think is subverted. The depiction of war in Atonement is mostly minimalist. We have scenes of Robbie and two other soldiers travelling through fields of colorful fields and another memorable shot of Robbie in front of a movie screen showing a kiss. This romantic imagery carries the romantic undertones of the movie through the war scenes.

Then the audience is updated on what is going on with Briony and we have the typewriter music back again announcing her return before we even see her. While training as a nurse, Briony has been working on a novel about a young girl who saw something that she didn't understand but thought she did. She understands now and goes to apologize to Robbie and Cecilia. Fast forward several decades and Briony is an elderly woman filming an interview about her latest book, Atonement, the book she had been writing her whole adult life. This is the moment when the movie shows it's true meaning and does something very unexpected. Briony reveals that some of what we've seen was fictional. Robbie and Cecilia never reunited after the war. Robbie's true last words in the film are "You won't hear another word from me. Promise," which he says a little over an hour into the movie. Cecilia died during a Blitz. Briony wrote the novel as penance for pulling apart these two people she cared about who were so in love. It makes me WEEP every time and I honestly can't think of a sadder ending to a movie. Just the word atonement kills me because, in the book, Briony can give Robbie and Cecilia the life together that she stole from them. The final shot is an imagined scene of Robbie and Cecilia together at the seaside cottage that they were meant to go to together.


This is relevant in the context of this genre challenge because I find it unusual to have an unreliable narrator in a film of this genre. It gives the story so much more meaning and makes it so much more interesting and heartbreaking.