On the fourth day of Christmas

Image from here

A couple of weeks ago I went to the movies with two friends. We saw the trailer for the movie Atonement. There was one brief shot, perhaps no more than two seconds, of a soldier walking through a field of red poppies. Those who read this blog know that I am easily given to tears and red poppies are a sure trigger of my feelings about dead soldiers. I just lost it in an instant. Fortunately, my ex was sitting next to me and held my hand for the next five minutes as I settled down. No explanation was needed.

It certainly seemed like the sort of rich, beautiful, haunting, elegiac British film one wants to see (well, some of us, anyway). Here is the synopsis from the film site:

The film opens in England in 1935, on the hottest day of the year. In the looming shadow of World War II Briony Tallis and her family live a life of wealth and privilege in their enormous Victorian Gothic mansion.

As the family gathers for the weekend the combination of the oppressive heat and long suppressed emotions coming to the surface create an ominous sense of threat and danger.

Briony, a fledgling writer, is a girl with a vivid imagination. Through a series of catastrophic misunderstandings she accuses Robbie Turner, the housekeeper's son and lover of her sister Cecilia, of a crime he did not commit.

The movie is stunning. Whether we are talking about direction, acting, cinematography, sets, costumes, or concept. I have not read Ian McEwan's novel, so cannot speak to the adaptation, though reviewers have both praised and pooh-poohed the translation to screen.

I was concerned that it would be a two-hanky movie. While other friends and I had a box of tissues with us when we saw Schindler's List, I had only one bandana to get me through this. I was fine, even in the war scenes, though moved. Then came the final scenes with Vanessa Redgrave as the aged Briony, followed by Cecilia and Robbie behaving playfully on the Dover coast.

I lost it throughout that and all the credits, in a way far beyond the usual good cry at a film. I automatically describe my reaction to friends with words like "slice" and "probe" and "cut too close to the bone." In other words, it reached deep inside me to a very vulnerable and sacred place.

Peter Travers reviews the movie in the December 13, 2007, issue of Rolling Stone and concludes thus:

In the end, Wright brings Atonement back to words, words with the force of ideas behind them. The older Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) is giving a TV interview about her latest novel. Redgrave isn't onscreen for very long. She doesn't need to be. Held in fierce close-up, she demonstrates what great acting is. And her words, reflecting on life's tendency to wound and art's propensity to heal, cut to the quick. Behind her shocking revelations lies a puzzle: Can an artist make amends for her sins through her art? Where Atonement is concerned, the only sin would be to miss it.

I had chatted with a friend last week about this review snippet. She is a fellow writer. Part of the issue is atonement but it was a larger ramification that got to me.

As writers we try to express truth, or a specific truth, or something true. If we write fiction, we do it by writing all manner of lies (making things up, playing with them, embellishing here, omitting there, leading and misleading the reader). In the process we attempt to further the world's co-creation and its healing. Granted, that is not every writer's perspective but I think it is shared by many. We try to make sense of the disjointed chaos around us, to heal what is broken, ennoble what is degraded, or at the very minimum provide some new perspective or insight that helps us live with reality. The issue raised at the end of the movie is whether we can truly do any of that.

I know that my fantasy fiction attempts to offer ways we might, in our present reality, perceive and behave differently. I do it by telling tales fabricated from all manner of fragments. (And here I recall how struck I was as a freshman in college by the phrase "these fragments have I shored against my ruins" in The Waste Land.) Among the many fragments assembled in my stories are bits and pieces from my own life, mostly in metathemes and small motifs rather than in any narrative sense. So, even in fiction of the "sword and sorcery" genre, there is an autobiographical element in accordance with the old dictum: "write what you know." I re-tell my own life in an indirect manner in order to make sense of it, to heal old wounds, to enable new possibilities, to find redemption.

The question remains: Can we truly do any of that?

I knew all that before watching the film. Having it exposed so poignantly, so beautifully, so tragically, so eloquently....

Close to the bone indeed.

Yes, I'm recommending the film, though I hope your hankies fare better than mine.
--the BB