I cannot adequately sum up into words the disappointment I felt after watching this film.
England 1935, and 13 year old Briony Tallis thinks there's something funny going on between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightly) and their strapping gardener Robbie (James McAvoy). She totally misinterprets several events that take place over the course of a day, and as a result Robbie is sent to prison. Five years later, With Britain at war, Robbie is in the army fighting at Dunkirk. Will he return to Cecelia? Will Briony put things right? Unfortunately, at this point I was past caring.
So what was wrong? For a start, the performances were awful - the idea seems to have been 'why act when you can overact?'. The direction was slow and ponderous. The characters were vacuous and two-dimensional.
I counted half-a-dozen or so scenes that could (and should) have been left on the cutting room floor, they seemed to have no point at all, weren't explained properly, nor did they lead anywhere. I suspect they were only left in to bring the film up to a two-hour running time
Then there were the continuity errors: A Lancaster bomber flying in 1935, six years before they were invented; Robbie losing his boots in one scene, only to be wearing them again in the next; Briony seeing Robbie and Cecilia through the open library door when they clearly closed it behind them when they went in; Briony saying that these events happened when she was 10 or 11, then later in the film saying they happened when she was 13; Robbie's letters, appearing and disappearing on his desk depending on the camera angle...And how deep was the water supposed to be in that garden fountain?????
Worst of all though, was the clumsy and contrived way the 'misunderstandings' were set up. I'm no dramatist, but I could see every one of them coming a mile off.
I'm sure the film-makers would say their film was poetic in its nature, not meant to be taken literally, but that is no excuse; Ed Wood and David Winters said the same about their movies. It also makes no sense for Briony to state at the end that she was telling 'whole truth, without embellishment' when the story is filled with embellishment from the very first scene.
On a personal note, I'd like to hear Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy do a riff on this movie. Perhaps I'll e-mail them....
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