Atonement is a 2007 romantic war drama film directed by Joe Wright and starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave. It is based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Ian McEwan. The film chronicles a crime and its consequences over the course of six decades, beginning in the 1930s. It was produced for StudioCanal and filmed in England. Distributed in most of the world by Universal Studios, it was released theatrically in the United Kingdom on 7 September 2007 and in North America on 7 December 2007.
Atonement opened both the 2007 Vancouver International Film Festival and the 64th Venice International Film Festival, making Wright, at age 35, the youngest director ever to open the Venice event. The film was a commercial success and earned a worldwide gross of approximately $129 million against a budget of $30 million. It received rave reviews, with critics praising its acting, emotional depth, Wright's direction, Dario Marianelli's score, the cinematography, editing, visuals and the film's incorporation of real life events.
Atonement won an Oscar for Best Original Score at the 80th Academy Awards and was nominated for six others, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for Ronan. It also garnered fourteen nominations at the 61st British Academy Film Awards, winning both Best Film and Production Design, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama.
Plot
In 1935 England, 13-year-old Briony Tallis, the youngest daughter of the wealthy Tallis family, is set to perform a play she wrote for an upcoming family gathering. She spies on her older sister, Cecilia, and the housekeeper's son, Robbie Turner (with whom Briony is infatuated), from her bedroom window. During their (Cecilia's and Robbie's) argument by the garden fountain, Robbie accidentally breaks a vase and yells at Cecilia to stay where she is – so as to avoid cutting her feet on the broken pieces on the ground. Still angered, Cecilia then strips off her outer clothing, stares at him and climbs into the fountain to retrieve one of the pieces. Briony observes all this from the window, and misinterprets the relationship between Cecilia and Robbie.
Robbie drafts a note to Cecilia to apologise for the incident. In one draft of the note, he pens his true, unfiltered feelings of attraction for Cecilia in very explicit language. Although he never intends for Cecilia (or anyone else) to see this version of the note, he mistakenly places it (instead of the second more formal note he drafts) in an envelope which he asks Briony to deliver to Cecilia. Only after Briony departs does he realise the wrong version of the note is in the envelope destined for Cecilia's hands. Making matters worse, Briony reads the letter before giving it to Cecilia. Later, she describes the note to her 15-year-old visiting cousin, Lola, who calls Robbie a "sex maniac". Paul Marshall, a visiting friend of Briony's older brother Leon, introduces himself to the visiting cousins and appears to be attracted to Lola. Before dinner, Robbie and Cecilia are alone in the library, at which time he apologises to Cecilia for the obscene letter but, to his surprise, she confesses her secret love for him. They proceed to make passionate love against the wall in the library as Briony walks in unseen and sees them together; Briony mistakenly thinks her sister is being raped.
During dinner, Lola's twin brothers go missing and the household organises into search parties. While participating in the search, Briony comes across Lola being raped by a man who flees upon being discovered. The two girls talk and Briony becomes convinced that it was Robbie; a confused Lola does not dissent, and the two return home. Later, Robbie — who finds the twins unharmed — returns to the house to see everyone waiting for him suspiciously. He ushers the twins inside and is promptly arrested despite Cecilia's pleas of his innocence. Lola and Briony's testimony, along with her turning over the explicit letter, convinces everyone but Cecilia of his guilt.