On the first day of June, I found myself crying over my dinner while watching Atonement. It was thunderstorming outside, and the rain roared as it pounded on the pavement. Outside my window the street was lit up by paparazzi lightning. Thunder was a slow, constant boom in the background, rising and falling. I remember thinking that it sounded like a plane was circling over ahead, always advancing or receding.
Sirens were floating above the barrage of noise. I found out later that tornadoes touched down in other parts of the state, and FEMA came in to respond to the damage. But at the time I didn’t notice. I was eating a dinner of leftovers alone after entertaining my visiting parents over the weekend. They had helped me do my laundry. And my boyfriend — correction, my ex-boyfriend— had gone out to dinner with us, helped me carry home a table, and then left town. He had been my boyfriend yesterday, but today he was not.
Benjamin and I had dated for over four years, with several heated breakups throughout, but we always got back together. In February I had tried to call it off again, but by April we were back together. He was moving away from Boston on May 31, I reasoned to myself. Either way, when he left, it would be over.
I always used to sort my Netflix queue by what we might both like to watch. In the last days of May, we talked about watching The Kids Are All Right, an unconventional comedy that had good reviews in The New York Times. The day I dropped it in the mailbox, I fiddled around with my queue at work, wondering what I’d like to watch next, when Benjamin and my parents would both be gone. Atonement had been waiting on my Netflix queue for months, silently reproaching me for not finishing the book. (I read half of it, got to the part where it began to be clear how depressing the rest it would be, and quit. In this manner I also quit Lolita and 1984.) I moved it to the top of my list.
At the time I was working for a Massachusetts state senator, as an interim legislative aide. I answered phones, sorted mail, and ran her Outlook schedule with a precision I did not bring to anything else in my life. But the staff was hesitant to bring me on full-time, entirely because I was not from the senator’s district — not even from Massachusetts, originally. They kept renewing my contract for 30 days more, promising to make a decision about my future soon. They were supposed to decide my fate by June 1. All spring, that date was a hard stop in my mind. My college reunion, my parents’ visit, and Benjamin’s move were before it. The future, whatever that would look like, was on the other.
What the future looked like, at least in the short run, was another day of work. A few days before June, after a harrowing period of wondering if I would be able to pay rent, the chief of staff called me into her office and offered me 30 more days. They hadn’t even started looking at other candidates, and as she reminded me again, because they were a political office, they had to be careful to hold a full hiring process so as to discourage any appearance of bias.
So after months of waiting, June 1 was a workday like any other. I paid my rent. I went to work, where I fielded phone calls and ate lunch at my desk. On the way home the clouds were darkening. Commuters on the red line crowded in and out of cars in the busy post-work rush, warily eyeing the darkening sky. I dashed home, ditched my Tupperware and business formal, checked my email, and warmed up my mother’s leftovers. Without the steady chatter of my parents and the warm presence of Benjamin, my sublet room was a very quiet place. My latest Netflix had been abandoned in a pile of unread mail and papers, waiting for a quiet evening. I slipped it out of its neat red sleeve and popped it into my DVD player.
Generally speaking, it’s not surprising that I would cry during a movie. Though I can never predict exactly what will make me cry (Moulin Rouge! left me dry-eyed, but I wept three separate times during Gladiator), I do cry. What’s more surprising is that when I finished Atonement, teary-eyed and hollow, I was taken aback by my own reaction. I felt that the movie had crept insidiously into me and then left, taking something with it. I felt empty; I honestly could not believe it had affected me so much. But later, as I thought about it, I realized that I had deliberately chosen a film I knew would bring me to tears. Unconsciously, yes, but deliberate nonetheless.
An adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel by the same name, Atonement follows a young girl named Briony, who misinterprets what she sees transpire between her older sister Cecilia and the gardener Robbie. They are falling in love, but Briony sees a crime. When an actual crime is committed, and the police investigate, she swears the culprit is Robbie. The police take her word for it, and Robbie and Cecilia are parted. Though they try to fight the injustice of his imprisonment, first the law and then World War II keep them apart. In no way does this sound like it’s going to end well. In fact, as I said earlier, I had even realized while reading the novel that it wasn’t going to end well. Furthermore, the lead roles of Robbie and Briony are played by James McAvoy and Keira Knightley. Oh dear.
I have a soft spot for James McAvoy. (In fact, I once convinced my sister to make out with a boy primarily because he looked like James McAvoy.) James McAvoy is many things — Scottish, married, Professor X — but most important to me, he is my “type.” I often find myself attracted to short (well, not short, but not tall), muscular men, slim and upright. And now that I thought about it — on the first day of June — James McAvoy looks and behaves a little bit like my ex-boyfriend Benjamin.
I do not, meanwhile, look or behave remotely like Keira Knightley, but I do have a bit of a complex about her. She’s only six months older than me, death-defyingly skinny, and played Elizabeth Bennett, after all. Even though I get snippy about her in clever conversations at cocktail parties, I often empathize with the characters she plays: emotionally expressive and whipsmart women somehow blind to their own charms.
So of course this romance played games with me. A movie with a dynamic, kind young man and a saucy, brazen young woman who fall for each other so quickly, so dramatically, so stupidly. Of course it plucked at my heartstrings and left me feeling hollow. It was a simulacrum of the narrative I had for my relationship with Benjamin.
Critically, Atonement is a good, but not great, movie. An extraordinarily tragic romance, it caters too much to the vagaries of viewers like me — bookish, narcissistic, Anglophilic romantics. In its attempt to maintain literary fidelity it sacrifices filmic quality, which is understandable, but unfortunate. The extended scene of Robbie stranded on the beach at Dunkirk is horrifically accurate, but the significance does not translate from page to screen. Yet something about that opening scene with the young lovers twisted inside me, and left me in a malaise. Despite its directorial faults, the film is extremely well acted and visually lush. The camera caresses the wartime hospital, Cecilia’s striking green dress, and the objets-d’art in the mansion with equal weight.
And that is enough. Though it is useful to respond to films critically, sometimes, a response is mostly pathos — and pathos is different for each member of the audience. Mine fixated on the actors and who they represented, on the scenery so vivid I could sink into it, on the fever-pitch of emotion running through the plot. It reminded me of great love, love that was no longer attainable in my relationship. It also reminded me that for all of the love and drama and passion that was in the biggest relationship of my life to date, it always sounded better on paper than it did in practice. Atonement’s trailer hints at a long-running passion, but in the movie, that burning passion, which ignites with great effect once, never ignites again, leaving the audience bereft.
When the movie was over I tried to finish my dinner and amuse myself with googled images of James McAvoy, but it was hard to shake off the terrible sadness I was feeling. At the time, the only thing that made sense was a fragment of a line from the movie. Robbie writes to Cecilia that he would like to start over with her, to live the life they were meant to live together. He calls himself “the man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you.” Watching an on-screen relationship, the issues seem so surmountable, the differences easily explained. In real life, we don’t have that lens. We’re in the middle of it, and can’t see outside ourselves. If I had ever wanted anything for my relationship with Benjamin, in that moment, what I wanted was the clarity of passion. A love that knew no doubts. A path with no obstacles. A future fixed like a beacon, attainable and knowable. A relationship not defined by confusion and miscommunication, but by a brightly burning flame. That fragment of dialogue was solid. I felt like I could hold it. It was the truth I’d made myself a vessel for.
I didn’t cry when Benjamin left, because it was easier to cry at something on screen, something contained to 123 minutes and 27 inches. And this terrible emptiness was a longing for what might have been with Benjamin, more than for Benjamin himself. If only it made so much sense, as it did in the film. We had a great trailer, but the film never worked right.
