Exploring "Atonement" Part 6

This week I have been posting edited extracts from an extended analysis I did a few years ago of Christopher Hampton's script ATONEMENT. 

Here is the final part, exploring some of the script's characters (spoilers, naturally, abound)

There Is No Briony

Who is Atonement's main character?

Despite the focus on them in the film's marketing and casting (see poster, left), Robbie and Cecilia remain slight characters.

At the beginning of the story it is clear that they are in love, but have not yet admitted this to each other. The reader however is none the wiser as to the reasons for this affection.

Their history as childhood friends and then contemporaries at Cambridge is hinted at initially¹ before being explained in a burst of exposition: ²

LEON

So Robbie the Housekeeper’s son, whose father did a bunk twenty years ago, gets a scholarship to the local grammar and the Old Man puts him through Cambridge; goes up at the same time as Cee and for three years she hardly speaks to him!

There is little else to lend depth to their characters or feelings aside from lingering glances, the sultry atmosphere of the Tallis estate in summer and the generic conventions of a love story.

Indeed, without the novel’s ability to peer behind that façade and understand any inner turmoil, the script is left with what appears to be a thinly characterised central couple. They have no real character arc or development to speak of. They are mostly acted upon rather than personally driving the plot forward.

So clearly we can see, though the commercial considerations we discussed previously may have required their romance be foregrounded, Cecilia and Robbie are not the script's protagonists.

That role belongs to Briony.

She is not initially an attractive character. The Briony we meet in the first act is a horror: selfishly forcing her cousins into performing in the play; demanding attention from all; spoilt and indulged by her mother.³ By the time of Robbie’s arrest, the audience is likely to despise the girl for her destructive lies and the self-righteous, wrong-headed justification of them.

While this loathing is a powerful form of audience engagement, moving through the script such an off-putting protagonist is unsustainable. Indeed, the story requires a level of empathy to be established with Briony by the end of the picture. So, when the script leaves the Tallis estate, a rehabilitation of Briony’s character in the eyes of the audience must begin.

Our first re-acquaintance with her character is thus significant.

When the audience next see her, Briony has been transformed from a manipulative child to a lowly nurse reprimanded for a minor offence by her superiors.⁴ It represents a massive status reversal for the character and is the first time the audience is encouraged to empathise with Briony - it is the first step in winning them back.

This continues throughout the hospital sequence. Briony trimming fellow nurse Fiona's fingernails illustrates not only her ability to make friends (implying that she is no longer such an unattractive person) but also the change in her attitude towards helping others. Earlier in the script, when asked to do something, Briony is wilfully disobedient⁵, but in this scene she gladly helps her friend. This transformation is highlighted cleverly through Fiona’s characterisation as a less reconstructed young lady (‘Mummy always did it for me.’⁶) not unlike the Briony who begins the screenplay.

Crucial to Briony's rehabilitation is her own admittance of guilt and implicit acceptance of the audience’s criticisms:⁷

BRIONY

It’s just...it’s about a young girl, a young and foolish girl, who sees something from her nursery window which she doesn’t understand, but she thinks she does...

Accompanying this confession are the attempts to atone, eventually directly to Robbie and Cecilia, but initially through service to others, such as the horribly injured Luc Cornet.⁸ This scene, one of the longest in the script, is crucial for creating audience empathy with Briony. In it, she is shown in the most harrowing circumstances kindly easing the pain of the Frenchman’s last moments. As he dies, she tells him sweetly, ‘Briony. Je m’appelle Briony’.

If the beginning of the hospital sequence saw the destruction of the Briony we knew (‘There is no Briony.’⁹), then this is the moment that she is reborn and embraced by the audience.

References
1. Briony asks why Cecilia no longer speaks with Robbie; Cecilia and Robbie discuss his future
(Hampton, Atonement, p. 5; p. 11)
2. Hampton, Atonement, p.17
3. Hampton, Atonement, p. 5; p. 2-3; p. 3
4. Hampton, Atonement, p. 66
5. Val Taylor, Stage Writing, A Practical Guide (The Crowood Press, 2002), p. 38-53
5.. Hampton, Atonement, p. 36
6. Hampton, Atonement, p. 67
7. Hampton, Atonement, p. 68
8. Hampton, Atonement, p. 73-8
9. Hampton, Atonement, p. 66