- guardian.co.uk,
- Monday February 04 2008 12.50 GMT
Director Joe Wright gives us an astonishing panoramic four-minute steadicam shot of Dunkirk, a memorable moment to match the balloon accident that kicked off the last McEwan adaptation, Enduring Love. Wright provided a lively and spirited Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley last time out and McEwan has admitted to Austen's influence for his bestseller, so the Wright-Knightley team was a natural to take this one on, though the most interesting role is not Knightley's but that of the story's unreliable narrator, played in three incarnations, all of them impressively. A largely accurate transposition of Ian McEwan's novel of two halves. The first half, as in the book, works splendidly as a spiky, tragicomical look at the lives and class wars of 1935 in a world soon to change forever, as seen through the uncomprehending eyes of its enjoyably precocious central character, Briony. The second - Dunkirk apart - is an anti-climactic tying up of events, thematically jumping from The Go-Between to The English Patient and explaining its own novelistic techniques through the same character, latterly taking the form of Vanessa Redgrave.
Romola Garai, who seems to appear almost exclusively in period drama, is especially good in the character's middle period, and Saoirse Ronan bagged one of the film's seven Oscar nominations - not to mention 14 Bafta nods - and is the only acting representative. This is an amazing performance from a 13 year old and suggests Wright, only 35 himself, is a whiz at coaxing the best out of kids. The family's lush country pile acts almost as an extra character and will, I imagine, bring a lot of gawping visitors to Stokesay Court in Shropshire. Christopher Hampton's script, also nominated, is every bit as good as he provided for The Quiet American (though I don't think anyone would have said "sorr-ree" in 1935, or even 1965). Another highlight is the driven typewriter-clacking score that dominates the first half, sinister and gunfire-loud, echoing the fateful role played by a pornographic note typed by James McAvoy, whose everyman quality is a plus in a film with memorable highlights.
