Atonement: Film And Film

Atonement is a British novel set in and around the Second World War. Written in 2001 by author Ian McEwan, it centres on a young upper-class girl's misjudged accusation that ruins the lives of the characters around her and her adult life to follow.

The novel was written into film in 2007 by Christopher Hampton, and directed by Joe Wright, who stuck carefully to the book's plot and particular dialogue, trying to convert it to the screen intact. On a purely plot basis, Hampton’s Atonement is a very faithful adaptation. As stated by Wright, the film’s director, “the book works, so we tried to be faithful to it. [We] kind of had faith that the film would work too if we stuck to the truth about the novel… we kept the book by our side throughout the whole process.” However, it proved a difficult task to bring the whole book on screen without making slight – arguably, necessary adjustments.

One of the most obvious changes being in that the book is understandably vastly wordy in comparison to the film, which is wordless at points, and deeply internal. The novel takes place almost completely inside the characters heads, which turn out to be overly complex and complicated, which was understandably one of the hardest elements to convert to the screen. What the novel depicts through long sentences, paragraphs, and long scenes, the film concludes in one angry stare or longing glance – showing the audience what a certain character is thinking, and how they may behave as the story continues. It takes the reader some time to ease into McEwan's complex structural pattern and slow, considered pacing. The film on the other hand, with its extended silent pauses, excess dialogue, and striking images, make it more accessible.

In the following scene o...

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...re, “a film is a close adaptation when most of the narrative elements in the literary text are kept in the film.” Hampton’s film therefore can be seen as a faithful remake of McEwan’s classic. As alluded by Yvonne Griggs “given the moral complexities of a novel like Atonement (2001) it is easy to categorise it as either a text which falls in the realms of the so-called unfilmable book, or one that requires radical reworking in order to “fit” the narrative expectations of mainstream cinema”, she continues “but like the novel from which it is adapted, Atonement (2007) attains a postmodern playfulness that invests cinematic narrative with ambiguity, reiterating in a cinematic context the novels debates about “authorship”, aesthetics and audience reception.” Essentially the tale translates well onto both mediums making Atonement successful both as a novel and a film.