Hail Brittania
Here come the Brits, one more time, with their grace and refinement, wit and whimsy, humour and pathos to crown the silver screen. Great is the charm of books and greater still is the rapture of acquired knowledge of man's fertile mind. British filmmakers know that only too well. They have converted their literature to cinema and the boundless spirit of a work of fiction lives on the screen as well as within the pages of a book. At its best, nothing can top British filmmaking which skilfully combines a rich and honest display of English life, both high and low. It may be easier for them, as they have such a vast treasure of literary gems to draw from. From Hamlet to Harry Potter, Britain has for generations offered its cinematic masterpieces to a public, hypnotized by their nonpareil classics, created by the likes of Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and on and on ad infinitum. It is often asked how Hollywood would have fared without British talent -- not nearly as well. British films however, have fared very well without Hollywood's interference. They may not be masters of the blockbuster, but they surely are the masters of the unforgettable literary classics.
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Keira Knightley WWII English army nurse
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The latest screen wonder from the British Isles is an adaptation of yet another piece of modern literature Atonement, a best-selling novel by Ian McEwan. The film just scooped off several Golden Globe awards last week, which bodes well for the upcoming Oscars. An impressive cast was carefully hand-picked by director Joe Wright ( Pride and Prejudice 2005) headed by the Oscar nominated British beauty Keira Knightley, Scotland's rising star John McAvoy, and the venerable Vanessa Redgrave. Knightley has dazzled moviegoers in the ever popular Pirates of the Caribbean series, Love Actually (2003) and as Elizabeth Bennett in the most recent adaptation of Jane Austen's popular Pride and Prejudice for which she was nominated as best actress for a Golden Globe and an Oscar. She is in perfect form in her recent outing.
Atonement is one of the most celebrated and honoured novels coming from England in recent years. It has coveted several prestigious awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the singular Booker Prize Award. Time Magazine named it the best fiction novel of the year (2001). Moreover it included it as one of the best 100 novels written, calling it "a contemporary classic of mesmerizing narrative conviction." Renowned novelist John Updike describes Atonemen t as "a staggering book -- something no American could have published". By all accounts the film rendition does credit to the book.
Utilizing several stylistic techniques, including meta fiction and psychological realism, Atonement is, to put it mildly, a complex creation by one of the most gifted and most controversial contemporary writers of the English language today. Regarded by most as his best work, Atonement is a story of guilt and redemption that spans more than half a century. The film version is a moving WWII romance, portraying with sensitivity and infinite care the life of the period. It opens on a hot summer day in 1935, and the story is divided into four parts. The romance begins between Cecilia Tallis and the housekeeper's son Robbie Turner. Precocious and naïve, Cecilia's younger sister Brioni aspires to be a writer. Compulsively, she wrongly accuses Cecilia love interest Robbie Turner of raping her 15 year old cousin Lola. Cecilia believe in his innocence, so does his mother, but Turner is arrested and spends 3 years in prison before being released on condition of enlistment in the army. Part 2 follows Robbie Turner in France during the Dunkirk evacuation, his fate unknown. Part 3 finds Brioni working as an army nurse in war torn London, believing this to be her atonement for wrongly accusing Turner of rape. She knows now that the rapist is Peter Marshall, her brother's friend, who is about to marry Lola, the raped victim. Despite her knowledge Brioni lacks the courage to speak out, confessing the truth only to her older sister Cecilia. Together they work out the legal steps necessary to exonerate Robbie Turner.
Titled London (1999), part 4 is written from Brioni's perspective, now a successful writer in her seventies, dying of vascular dementia. She describes in an unpublished novel the details of the rape, the lie, the guilt, the atonement, only to be published after the death of Lola and Peter Marshall. Despite her constant guilt, pain and suffering, Brioni reaches the conclusion that no amount of atonement can erase the crime she committed at 14, which has haunted her throughout her life.
To see Ian McEwan, it is hard to believe he is the same writer who has constantly stirred such controversy. He is a cross between the absent-minded professor and a middle-aged Harry Potter. Well-mannered, gently spoken and intellectual looking, McEwan's pen has well concealed his true colours.
His first book First Love, Last Rites (1975) included such candidly sexual stories, one of them Geometry, made for BBC TV, was banned from transmission. His first novel The Cement Garden (1978) dealt with incest, and Saturday (2005) tackled terrorism. Referred to by critics as "the leading English novelist of his generation," his 1998 novel Amsterdam won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction and the Man Booker Prize. Saturday describes a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon, on the same day in 2003 when a million people converged on London in a protest against the forthcoming war in Iraq. His latest novel On Chesil Beach h as again met with the customary success and controversy.
His friends and critics describe him as a meticulous writer who toils for years over his work; it took him 3 years between his first and second publication. Besides talent and training, it is hard work that is rewarded in the end. Excellence is not easily reached, and he continues to agonize over a sentiment, a word, or a comma.
Director Joe Wright seems to be made of similar stuff. A two-time BAFTA winner, Wright's first feature was the critically acclaimed Pride and Prejudice (2005) nominated for 4 Academy Awards. He became the youngest director ever to have a film open at the Venice Film Festival, with Atonement his second feature.
Fiction can be stranger than life; it can also be more merciful. Whether drawn from novels, classics, history or theatre, British thought, culture, traditions, and literary works have laid the foundation to film's great achievements and remain pretty hard to catch up with.
Words are, of course,
the most powerful drug used by mankind
Rudyard Kipling (1865 -- 1936)
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