So I had the bright idea to see every movie nominated for Best Picture of 2007. Amazingly, I've found that most of the best movies weren't nominated. (In a year with Bug, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Across the Universe and Into the Wild, what the hell did Juno do that made it better?) Like many other art-hating philistines, I didn't "get" the ending of No Country for Old Men. There Will Be Blood felt unfocused, though I'm sure it would be better on a second viewing (and if I had to see any of them again, that would be the one). Michael Clayton was merely okay, without much really putting it ahead of the pack. Juno... Juno just sucks. (Seriously, is it too much to ask for one character that doesn't talk like a MySpace page?)
I'd saved Atonement for last. This was mainly circumstancial; it was the second to get to DVD, and passed the cheap theaters I saw all but Juno at. So I ended up waiting until I found a copy at my local library to check it out. And... it's pretty bad.
I originally wrote a big long dissertation on the film's flaws, but I've since moved that to the review blog. If you must, read it here.
I'd just like to warn anybody who hasn't seen Atonement and still wants to for some reason, I'm going to discuss the ending. Be warned.
Little Sister has also become a nurse, writing in her spare time. One day, she sees a newsreel and realizes that the real rapist was a friend of their uncle's, who's now married the little girl. Little Sister visits Older Sister and Gardener. They're mad, but advise her on what to do about FLASH FORWARD! (Yeah, it's about as sudden in the movie.) Little Sister is now an old woman, a novelist with Alzheimer's, who's written about the incident in her new novel. In the interview, she reveals the ending of her own book (that'll be good for sales!), and the Big Shocking Twist of the movie.
That scene with Older Sister and the Gardener? It didn't really happen. It was fictional. Both of them died in the war, so she wrote the story's ending to give them the ending they truly deserved.
Excuse me while I throw the disc out the window.
For pete's sake, people. This is just as bad as the ending of The Usual Suspects; I haven't seen that one, but let's face it, everybody knows that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze all along. The thing is, he's been telling a story all along where he isn't, which basically means that all of the story he's been telling is in question. What was true, and what wasn't? Roll credits before anybody can figure it out!
That ending, along with the ending of The Sixth Sense, might be responsible for every damn horror movie nowadays being required to have a stupid twist ending. (The worst is likely Perfect Stranger, where after having investigated for the whole damn movie, it turns out Halle Berry committed the murder. This seems oddly relevant.) But you know what I like about The Sixth Sense's ending? Predictable as it is now in retrospect, it made sense. The movie didn't cheat; they went and put little hints in all the way through. Atonement makes no such hint at the ending, probably because it's impossible to hint at.
The thing is, film is a very literal medium. We have to be able to trust that what we're seeing is true, because if it isn't, why are we seeing it? We want to be shown what happened, not what didn't happen.
The ending could have worked if the movie had played fair. If they had admitted that the characters were dead before the fictional scene, I wouldn't have had a problem. But apparently, an honest ending would have been too much to ask for. After all, once they'd come up with such a clever idea, why let anything like an audience's intelligence stop it?
