Exploring "Atonement" Part 5

Over the next week or so I'm posting edited extracts from an extended analysis I did a few years ago of Christopher Hampton's script ATONEMENT. 

Here is part five... (spoilers, naturally, abound)

Atonement and genre

Genre. It can get a bad name. The word seems to make some writers blanche -- my work can't be categorised, man! It is but a slip of the pen from that sin of sins "generic".

But if we are to understand why a film succeeds or fails an understanding of genre is vital. The occasionally mocked "script guru" Robert McKee has it right when he states, ‘from the title to the poster through print and TV ads, promotion seeks to fix the type of story in the mind of the audience’.¹ It is partly through this positioning that a script finds a home and film-makers an audience. But with it of course come conventions -- character types, plot devices and style that viewers will expect to feature in the film. Too great a deviation from these can be as damaging as an overly slavish and predictable adherence to the same.

Genre causes problems for Atonement.

Throughout its development there seems to have been a tension between the story that Atonement wishes to tell and the audience that it hoped to find on release.

We have already explored the script's unusual structure and literary themes. Indeed to my mind they are its greatest strengths. Yet, as Atonement's screenwriter Christopher Hampton admits - ‘a pretty, expensive art film about a writer and her very particular sufferings [...] might well seem a hard sell’.²

It is unsurprising then that the film's pre-release positioning presented it as a period romance. Robbie and Cecilia's story is simply a more attractive proposition to a larger audience and such a focus allowed the production to cast bigger names as its "leads".

To a certain extent, scripts such as Atonement require big name casting not only to be produced but also to find a large enough audience to make that production worthwhile. Briony's role is unsuitable to top billing. It spreads over a large age range and required several actors to play. A child actor capable of opening a movie on her star power alone would be a rare find. On the other hand, if it had been decided that the main starring role was to be the Briony of the Second World War, this would keep our lead off-screen until page sixty-four of a ninety-two page screenplay. No production is going to make such a decision. Hence the top billing going to Keira Knightly and James McAvoy as Cecilia and Robbie, characters present from the beginning and throughout the majority of the script.

So we are encouraged to view the story as a romance. We all know what to expect from a romance - a thrilling love threatened by mistakes, misunderstandings and antagonistic forces before a final reunifitcation at the end of the story. Certainly, Atonement fulfils some of these³. However, in other crucial respects, the generic expectations encouraged by the film's positioning are not entirely satisfied.

Again the film's ending plays a key role in this.

The sudden narrative shift destroys audience assumptions about the direction of the story and its possible outcomes. Much of the preceding narrative in which viewers have emotionally invested is suddenly revealed as false. Cecilia and Robbie both died far away from one another, without ever achieving that final unification.

This clash between the generic expectations set up by the script and the eventual outcome is bold. It risks alienating the audience, who will have engaged with the story on the assumption that it is operating within certain recognisable and desired frameworks.

Older Briony of course does attempt to give the couple -- and the audience -- their happy ending:⁴

She thinks for a moment.

OLDER BRIONY

I gave them their happiness.

EXT. BEACH BELOW WHITE CLIFFS. DAY.

ROBBIE and CECILIA crunch across the pebbles and splash gleefully through the waves, below the towering white cliffs on their way back to their white clapboard cottage.

With the knowledge gained in the previous scene, Briony's "happy ending" is bittersweet at best however.

As an attempt to fulfil genre expectations it was always doomed however, because, despite the marketing and the cast billing, this is not Robbie and Cecilia's story at all.

I'll explore this more next time.

References

1. Robert McKee, Story (Methuen, 1999), p. 90
2. Hampton, Atonement, p. vi

3. A beautiful couple, (one upper class, one lower - another classic trope of romance stories) whose incipient love is threatened by Briony and the Second World War.
4. Hampton, Atonement, p. 91-92