Atonement (2007)

Is it okay for a film to ask a question and not have an answer? A stupid question, I know. So what about the movie that has an answer, but for whatever reason, chooses to hold it behind its back with its fingers crossed? It’s sort of a rabbit hole type criticism and (a caveat-type warning) I can’t really help myself. So:

What is atonement? What does it mean to atone, and who does it benefit? Is to benefit the impetus of atonement? And if you accept for a moment that it isn’t self-serving then to whom does it serve? “She did it to make herself feel better.” Does anyone else feel a big hot air balloon deflating over our heads? Those baskets are heavy. It would be wise to step aside.

I’m not even going to mention heteroglossia. Or okay: a narrator in fiction has a kind of authority that we implicitly accept. But there are also signposts used to signify the unreliability of narration and that can never be interesting (straight-up) if it’s just confession (why? Pretend the reason for confession is a train traveling east at 35 miles an hour, and the reason for unreliability is a train traveling west at 23 miles an hour. The trains are 60 miles apart and on the same track. What happens?).

And okay, one of the reasons I love Madame Bovary is the heterodiegesis that’s floating around in it. We were at prep. And the fact that you’re a butterfly at the wrong end of Flaubert’s pin. And yes, you’ll find all the arguments about how Bahktin’s “discourse” can’t really be applied to film criticism because the notion of narrative / narratee gets muddled anyway, I’m sure. So MB’s heterodiegesis is a posteriori, namely, inductive, built-in, upon self-reflection: in the present. The narrative games are within the narration, i.e., the signposts are being touched accordingly. It’s clever and it plays by the rules. (I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS).