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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Writing and Misleading on Screen: Atonement (Ian McEwan/Joe Wright)

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How does the film adaptation of Atonement by Joe Wright find original ways to adapt what lies at the core of the novel by Ian McEwan—the ins and outs of writing? The film endeavours to transfer, cinematically or not, the metafictional and definitely postmodern dimensions in McEwan's story. Wright first works on point of view, sticking to young Briony's in the first part and elaborating on her re-vision and revisiting of events the meaning of which she thinks she can grasp. But seeing is constantly equated with writing in the novel, and Wright's film convincingly plays around this equation. “Writing on screen” it does indeed, either thematically—with the definitions and aims of writing according to McEwan's narrators, or more aesthetically—for instance through an inventive use of music over and embedded settings. From the activity of writing Wright also amplifies on contents and narratives and tries to evoke the many shifts in McEwan's narration, as with boom shots and direct gazes. Atonement also sometimes tackles film creation and its constructive, falsely evident status between reality and fiction. Are the images the audience is given to see always Briony's recreation of the past, or do they not eventually call for some more realistic and historical quality? In the film quite as much as in the novel, the tricks in Briony's and the narrators' writings to mislead reading/viewing, become the prime movers of aesthetic choices. The film might be miswatched quite the same way the novel will be misread, misleading and deceiving the audience in a metafictional way eventually purely cinematic. Writing and misleading—the gist of McEwan's project—would then be preserved on screen perhaps not cinematically enough, but in numerous ways that may further the novel as now and then question the misleading potential of film images.