Atonement
Normally I have no patience for movies whose plot depends on a miscommunication. You know the kind: the hero leaves a note for the heroine explaining what he’s doing, but she doesn’t get the note and assumes he’s left her, and then she goes off and marries a jerk. I’m not interested in any plot that could be resolved by two people having a brief conversation along the lines of “Did you get my message?” Best Picture nominee Atonement is superficially a tragic love story, doomed in part on a misplaced note. But it is a series of events that lands Robbie (James McAvoy) in jail rather than in the arms of Cecilia (Keira Knightley - random aside: my daughter and I found ourselves visiting the Cabinet War Rooms in London with Knightley in the summer of 2005 where I’m guessing she was doing a little background research for this movie). And the movie is less about their love story than it is about Cecilia’s little sister Briony who screwed things up for them in the first place. But the movie suffers from conflicting interests in storytelling: Briony’s efforts to atone for her childhood misdeed and Robbie and Cecilia’s efforts to reunite and put the embarrassment of the past behind them. Ultimately, I felt it gave neither story sufficient due. The love story is poorly established and therefore not as compelling as it should be, and Briony’s story is left aside for a long stretch in the middle of the film as we see Robbie slogging through northern France at the start of World War II. This sequence does feature one staggeringly heroic shot of the chaos at the beach at Dunkerque. That minutes-long shot by itself might have motivated some of the votes for this movie’s Best Picture nomination.