Atonement
Directed by Joe Wright

After the enormous success of their film versions of E.M. Forster's Room With a View and Howards End, the director James Ivory and the producer Ismail Merchant became the first and last names in high-end literary adaptation, at first for good and then, ultimately, for ill. Movie partisans whose tastes tend to the sensational and pyrotechnical--and who happen to dominate the world of film reviewing--loved to speak slightingly of "Merchant-Ivory costume dramas" which were, they said, so concerned with being of unimpeachable taste that they were lifeless and bloodless.

Though this charge had some merit in a few Merchant-Ivory examples (The Bostonians and The Remains of the Day, in particular), it was wrongheaded when it came to their best films. What they and their screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, actually accomplished was the opposite of bloodlessness. They managed to break literary adaptation out of the static Masterpiece Theatre straitjacket without dumbing down the works they were representing on film. At their best, Merchant-Ivory movies suffuse the screen with the wit, passion, and urgency of the novels from which they derive, and in so doing, they make the point that a work of literature need not be a diorama but can be a powerfully immediate and uniquely engaging thing.

Thanks chiefly to the Merchant-Ivory influence, the 1990s saw a renaissance of literary adaptation, with a wonderful Sense and Sensibility, a tough-minded Persuasion, and a remarkably clear Wings of the Dove. Even Martin Scorsese got into the act with a marvelous rendition of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, a film that merits a second and even third viewing. All these films manage to be faithful to their distinguished sources and purely cinematic at the same time.

Joe Wright, a British director, came out with a version of Pride and Prejudice two years ago that is not quite up to those standards; his long-maned Darcy is far too much like the romance-novel characters he inspired and his model-thin Lizzie Bennet too much of an ingénue. But it's a pretty good movie nonetheless. The same cannot be said, however, for Wright's adaption of Atonement, Ian McEwan's rapturously reviewed 2002 novel, which is one of the most exhaustingly overwrought movies I've ever seen. So intent is Wright (in collaboration with screenwriter Christopher Hampton) on bringing McEwan's extremely literary work to cinematic life that it's as though he attached jumper cables to the book and attached the other ends to a nuclear reactor. Scenes are run forwards and backwards and played three times over. The musical score pounds at you. Sequences intended to express a delirious romanticism are drippy to the point of self-parody.

McEwan's novel is about the consequences of an act of hysteria. Wright's movie is an act of hysteria.

In Atonement, which begins at a stately English country manor in 1935, a post-collegiate couple fall in love on the same day a teenage girl is molested. The two events are conflated in a tragic and awful way by the protagonist, a 13-year-old budding writer named Briony who is witness to both events, misunderstands both, and arranges a monstrous punishment. The punishment destroys her family and haunts Briony until she seeks to expiate her sin by becoming a nurse in London a few months into World War II. In the meantime, the young lovers find each other again until they are separated by war, and their ultimate fate is not revealed until Briony is an old novelist nearing death at the turn of the new millennium.