Talk:Atonement (2007 film)

Long plot?

Per WP:FILMPLOT: Plot summaries for feature films should be between 400 and 700 words. The summary should not exceed the range unless the film's structure is unconventional, such as with non-linear storylines, or unless the plot is too complicated to summarize in this range. (Discuss with other editors to determine if a summary cannot be contained within the proper range.)

So let's discuss. First off, I dispute the characterization of the current 910 word plot as "massively bloated". It is a bit over the suggested range of 400 and 700, but I wouldn't call it "massively bloated".

In fact, allow me to suggest the plot section is fine as-is. The movie is not a simple or straight-forward one, and I can easily see a consensus forming around making an exception here. We should not reduce a plot section merely to conform to policy if that leaves out an important plot point.

To that end, I have removed the tag in case nobody contests the above. (Obviously I will not remove it again if reapplied, at least not until a consensus has been reached).

The best solution, of course, would be for the tagging editor to not merely perform drive-by tagging, and instead boldly edit the plot section to still remain informative and useful, just in two hundred words less.

Regards, CapnZapp (talk) 06:34, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

I am working on a shorter edit right now, not to 700 words, but if you want I can put the draft here, to see if it's more acceptable (keep in mind not 700 yet, but shorter).

Disclaimer I do like it how it currently is, but I think some trim would help a lot (not to 700, but still trim it down a little).

I got to 785 words with this draft.

"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 near the 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 and climbs into the fountain to retrieve one of the pieces. Briony observes and misinterprets all this from her window.

Robbie drafts a note to Cecilia to apologise for the incident. He pens his true, unfiltered feelings of attraction for Cecilia in very explicit language, and mistakenly gives it to Briony to deliver to Cecilia; only after Briony departs does he realise he send the wrong explicit letter; 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, 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 love for him. They proceed to have sex against the wall in the library, as Briony walks in unseen and sees them; Briony mistakenly thinks her sister is being raped.

During dinner, Lola's twin brothers go missing and search parties are organised. While participating in the search, Briony comes across Lola being raped by a man who flees upon being discovered. 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; 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.

In 1940, during the Second World War, Robbie is released from prison on the condition that he joins the army and fights in the Battle of France. Separated from his unit, he makes his way on foot to Dunkirk. He thinks back to six months earlier when he met Cecilia, now a nurse. Briony, now 18, joined Cecilia's old nursing unit at St Thomas' Hospital in London rather than go to the University of Cambridge. She writes to her sister, but Cecilia cannot forgive her for her part in falsely implicating Robbie. Robbie, who is gravely ill from an infected wound, finally arrives at the beaches of Dunkirk, where he awaits evacuation.

Briony, who regrets implicating Robbie, learns from a newsreel that Paul Marshall, who now owns a factory supplying rations to the British army, is about to marry Lola. As Briony attends the wedding, she reliases it was Paul who assaulted Lola all those years ago. Briony visits Cecilia to apologise, and is surprised to find Robbie there living with her sister while on leave; Briony suggests correcting her testimony, to which Cecilia says she would be an "unreliable witness". Briony apologises for her deceit, but Robbie is enraged that she has still not accepted responsibility for her actions. Cecilia and Robbie try to instruct Briony on how to set the record straight and get Robbie's conviction overturned; however, Briony points out since Paul Marshall married Lola, she will not be able to testify against her husband.

Decades later, when Briony is an elderly and successful novelist, she gives an interview about her last book, an autobiographical novel titled Atonement, and explains she is dying from vascular dementia. During the interview, she reveals that portion of the book where Robbie and Cecilia are living together and Briony attempts to apologize to them is completely fictitious. Briony could never atone for her mistake, and Cecilia and Robbie were never reunited; Robbie died of septicaemia from his infected wound on the morning of the evacuation at Dunkirk, and Cecilia died months later after drowning during an underground flood due to the Balham tube station bombing during the Blitz. Briony admits that she wrote her novel with its fictitious ending to give the two, in fiction and in death, the happiness they never had because she was responsible for mistakenly identifying Robbie as Lola's rapist.

The last scene shows an imagined and happily reunited Cecilia and Robbie staying in the house by the sea which they had intended to visit once they were reunited." Duyneuzaenasagae (talk) 18:20, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Untitled

The information is incorrect in many ways. Briony has a clear crush (admittedly) on Robbie and doesn’t understand the Atonement she will face for her fictitious accusations.

There are many nuances here in which she as a young woman doesn’t understand that her accusations will kill Robbie. She tries to truly make up for them during the war by becoming a nurse. She delivered the letter on purpose to be viscous because she was jealous.

It’s a great movie that you may need to see more than once to comprehend. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:6C1:100:5A80:A46A:171A:B7D:73D4 (talk) 07:35, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Balham historical inaccuracy

The fact itself (initial version, since condensed: In the interview scene at the end of the film, Briony Tallis (played by Vanessa Redgrave at this juncture), says that her sister Cecilia was killed in the flooding of Balham underground station on 15 October 1940 as a result of aerial bombing by the Luftwaffe whilst the station was being used as an air-raid shelter; the bombing and the subsequent flooding of the station actually occurred the previous evening (14 October 1940) in reality.) was added back in April 2017 and I originally thought it'd be fine reporting this, especially as I believed our source verified our claim.

However.

The source provided (added in March 2020) is a poor choice. Finally having hunted down the actual text, it does NOT talk about the date in the context of it being a historical inaccuracy. It simply acts to verify the actual historical date. We need (and I assumed "Trauma and Romance..." was such a source) a source specifically reporting this to be a historical inaccuracy. The source simply does not support our claim that this detail "has been reported" as a historical accuracy. With a good helping of good faith, the source can be misinterpreted as saying such since it does discuss Briony as an unreliable narrator; how unclear it is that Cecilia actually died in the bombing... but about the actual date "Trauma and Romance..." simply reports the facts: Sure enough, the station, which had been turned into an air-raid shelter, received a direct hit from a German bomb on October 14, 1940, killing 64 people, as quoted on the memorial plaque in the station itself. It never even mentions how Briony gives the 15th as the date, much less makes a deal out of the discrepancy. If anything this source would suggest this historical inaccuracy is NOT notable at all, especially in comparison to the in-universe unreliability of the narrator (At this point, a page before the end, an exceedingly uncomfortable oscillation is set up inside the mind of the somewhat bewildered and traumatised victim of the text, me at least. This oscillation is something like our bewilderment before a famous Piranesi etching that does not make spatial sense, or before certain Escher etchings that are equally irrational, or before that celebrated Gestalt duck-rabbit, mentioned earlier.

The movie does not depict the events of the bombing on the wrong date. It merely has a narrator give the wrong date. Is this really notable?

Well, that's where a new source comes in. I'm hesitantly going to let the paragraph remain but replace the source with a fact tag. If no source that verifies our claim this historical accuracy HAS been reported or discussed, feel free to remove the entire thing as not notable after all. Do note: a source should not merely confirm the actual historical date. It needs to specifically discuss the discrepancy in the context of the book and verify our claim CapnZapp (talk) 16:16, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

OK, this does look increasingly weak and trivial, and if we don't have a secondary source that notes it as a discrepancy, it should probably be cut. As a matter of interest, can anyone tell us exactly what Briony says in the film? In the novel, the bombing is misdated to September (which is a slightly more significant slip, but obviously not appropriate for mention in this article): Cecilia was killed in September of the same year [1940] by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. [this section in Briony's voice]. GrindtXX (talk) 00:09, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

A possibly on-topic comment: could I ask you to not refer to the mention in the passive voice? the bombing is misdated to September can be construed as a bigger error than "Briony misdates the bombing to September." Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 15:47, 17 April 2024 (UTC)