Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Atonement
2007 · Joe Wright · Atonement on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the greens on the lawn in 1935. (light)
Seamus McGarvey shoots the country house in a saturated, light-soaked palette during a heat wave, on 35mm. The air looks heavy. Once the film reaches the war the color drains and coarsens.
Payoff: The first hour is lit like a memory rather than a day, which is a clue about who is telling this.
Listen for the typewriter inside the music. (sound)
Dario Marianelli builds the clack of a manual typewriter into the rhythm of the score. It starts under the opening and keeps returning, sometimes as percussion, sometimes as a sound in the room.
Payoff: Somebody is typing this. The soundtrack keeps saying so while the pictures behave like plain events. In the reading: the readable image. The reading calls this a lectosign: an image that quietly stops being self-evident and asks to be read.
Watch the fountain scene, then watch it happen again. (structure)
Wright shows the minute first from Briony's upstairs window, too far off to hear, then from close by. The second version is gentler and truer. The first one stays on the screen anyway.
Payoff: You hold two accounts of one minute and are not told which to keep. The film is training you for that. In the reading: the powers of the false. The reading calls this the powers of the false: true and false made genuinely undecidable, and used as the film's engine.
Look at the green dress and how often it returns. (setting)
Jacqueline Durran gives Cecilia one emerald evening gown and Wright lights it to carry the whole evening. Knightley's costume does the work of character, desire and color motif at once.
Payoff: A single garment organizes the night, so you remember the scene by its color rather than by its dialogue.
Watch Saoirse Ronan's face while she is watching others. (performance)
Ronan plays Briony at thirteen as certain rather than confused. She looks, she decides, and her expression does not waver. The film gives her long stretches of pure observation.
Payoff: Her certainty is the danger. You can see her converting what she sees into something she already believes.
Once you have seen it
Count the cuts in the Dunkirk beach sequence. (camera)
There are none for about five minutes. A Steadicam operator walks Robbie past a Ferris wheel, men shooting horses, a choir singing in a wrecked bandstand. A thousand extras, one day, one take.
Payoff: Combat cutting would break the beach into actions a man could answer. The unbroken shot leaves him only looking.
Watch Vanessa Redgrave hold one close-up to the end. (performance)
The elderly Briony sits for an interview and states plainly what she wrote and why. The film gives her a single sustained shot and no cutaways to soften it.
Payoff: The novelist who invented the accusation also invented the comfort, and she says both out loud in one take. In the reading: le faussaire. The reading calls Briony a forger: someone who produces truth rather than reporting it, and keeps producing it for decades.
Track what the last movement does to every earlier scene. (structure)
Tothill had to build the turn without showing his hand. Nothing in the war sequences is flagged as composed. The kindest passages in the film are the ones that turn out to be written.
Payoff: The beauty was the cover. A sentence can be made precisely so its writer does not have to look at something.
Look at who uses which stairs in the Tallis house. (staging)
Sarah Greenwood lays the house out as a class map. Robbie is the housekeeper's son, educated by the family and still on the wrong side of it. The rooms keep telling you his position.
Payoff: The accusation sticks because of where he stands in that house. Nobody has to argue it out loud.
Carry this in: Watch the fountain twice and notice you cannot get back to before you knew. Briony cannot either.