Friday Movies: Atonement
Jonathan Player for The New York Times
A friend asked me, at lunch on Thursday, if I was keen to see Atonement, and I said that I wasn’t. And that was true — until I discovered that Atonement would be showing across the street at ten the next morning.
I liked it better than I thought I would, but I understood the critics’ reservations. (The critics I had in mind are A O Scott of the Times and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker.) I also bore in mind something that an executive producer said of the adaptation: “The one thing movies don’t do particularly well is consciousness, and the book is largely about consciousness.” The EP in question was author Ian McEwan.
¶ Atonement.
