Ian McEwan’s widely feted novel was always going to be a bitch to adapt, but director Joe Wright and writer Christopher Hampton have made a decent fist of it here. Unsurprisingly it’s the first act that suffers, lacking the sensual, lugubrious intensity of McEwan’s extraordinary prose. And it’s Wright’s mistake- if he’d been a little braver as a director, drenched the screen in colour and liquid sunlight as opposed to the rather cold look the film utilizes, it could have been something special, rather than merely entertaining. And the typewriter driven soundtrack, while innovative, is a little crisp and even for the subject matter.
But things improve when James McAvoy gets to France, and the much heralded Dunkirk tracking shot really is something to behold, perhaps unintentionally serving as a strange nostalgia trip through the history of British war cinema- there are moments that directly recall The Charge of the Light Brigade, Oh, What A Lovely War!, Colonel Blimp. The structure is all over the place, and one feels Hampton could have taken more liberties with the novel in order to knock it into filmable shape- the ending is seriously underwhelming after all that’s gone before. But overall, this is a perfectly serviceable slice of wistful Englishness, if not the masterpiece it so desperately wants to be.
Props, too, for featuring possibly the inaugural use of the word ‘cunt’ in a British historical costume drama: even if it’s never actually spoken, there were audible gasps around the Ambleside Zefferelli’s when it flashed up thirty feet high on the flickering screen.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: 35mm print
17 Sep 2007 12:49 PM | Submit Comment
