January 10, 2008 -- This story has a setup which depends on a string of nine wildly improbable coincidences in order to start moving forward. Many people apparently accept these coincidences, but I could not suspend my disbelief to that extent. The first coincidence is that a young girl (Briony Tallis, played by three different actresses at different points in her life) just happens to look out her window to see her sister, Cecilia Tallis (played by Keira Knightley of “Pride and Prejudice”) take off her dress and go diving in a fountain to retrieve a piece of a valuable vase, while the gardener's son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy of “Becoming Jane”) looks on. She looks away at just the right instant and misunderstands what is going on. Later, Robbie Turner writes a private note to Cecilia to apologize for what he said and just happens to put the wrong (x-rated) note in the envelope. Briony gets her hands on the envelope, reads the note inside and again, gets the wrong impression. Later, Briony just happens to walk in on Cecilia and Robbie having sex in the library, and again, unlikely as it seems, gets the wrong impression. Later, Briony just happens to stumble upon two more people having sex on the grounds of the massive English estate where she lives, and again, gets the wrong impression, this time about who is having sex. She publicly accuses Robbie of raping an underage girl and he is sent away to prison, although he is not the person she saw. The girl who was raped coincidentally, doesn't know who raped her. This string of coincidences (and there are more I haven't mentioned) is like a house of cards. Pull one of them out and the whole plot falls apart.

That is a lot of coincidences. The purpose of all these coincidences is twofold, one to set up the rest of the story and two, to make Briony look less evil than she really is. Here is the real shocker: We are actually supposed to believe that Briony, a girl with the worst powers of observation in the history of mankind, who misunderstands everything she sees, and seemingly has no grasp of human nature at all, later becomes a renowned author! Give me a friggin' break. At the end of the film there is another shocker, Briony, now played as a dying woman by the venerable Vanessa Redgrave, reveals that she is not telling us what really happened to Robbie and Cecelia at all, she is just making it all up. There is a different narrative, previously not mentioned, that is the “real” story. Of course there is no “real” story. The whole thing is actually fiction, so why not make up a better story? At least make up a story that's plausible. It is like somebody telling you this wild story. At the end, you say, “Wow, that's amazing! Did that really happen?” The person telling the story says, “No, not really. I just made the whole thing up.” By the way, there is an easy fix for all those coincidences. Briony could just say at he end of the movie that she made up all those coincidences to make herself look less guilty for her crimes. I would buy that.

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Copyright © 2008 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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