ATONEMENT Review

The word closure is one of the most dishonest words in the English language. It implies that grief has a door, and that the right conversation, the right apology, the right moment of witnessed pain, can shut it. Reed Van Dyk's Atonement knows this. It is a film about a man who wants closure and a woman who has learned to live without it, and it is wise enough to understand that those are not the same journey and cannot be resolved into one. That wisdom, more than anything else, is what separates it from the long and often embarrassing tradition of American war cinema it is consciously working against.

The facts are these. In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, a squad of US Marines on a Baghdad rooftop fired on a car carrying a Christian family trying to return home after a bomb blast. The husband and two adult sons were killed. The mother, Mariam, survived. Ten years later, one of the Marines, now a discharged veteran retraining as a lawyer in California, tracks down the journalist who reported on the incident and asks him to broker a meeting with the woman whose family he helped destroy. What he is seeking, the film is honest enough to question, may say more about his own wounds than about hers.

The film opens in Iraq. Not in America. That decision, held to without flinching, is the most important thing Van Dyk does, and he does it first.

Van Dyk structures the film in three chapters, each centered on a different character. Lou the Marine, volatile and guilt-wracked and played by Boyd Holbrook with a hyper-expressive intensity that occasionally tips into excess but mostly convinces. Michael the journalist, played by Kenneth Branagh with quiet, discreet authority, a man who appears in control of his professional calling while quietly falling apart behind it. And finally Mariam, played by Hiam Abbass in a performance of such concentrated, ferocious stillness that the film's entire moral weight settles into her the moment she appears on screen and stays there.

The final chapter, which follows Mariam through her ordinary morning in a Glendale apartment before Lou and Michael arrive, is the film's greatest achievement. Van Dyk lets her exist before she is asked to respond to anything. We watch her make coffee. We watch her move through her home. We understand, without being told, the full weight of what she carries in these unremarkable minutes. When the knock comes at the door, we are already on her side in ways the film never had to argue us into.

Abbass speaks little in these scenes. She does not need to. Her stillness is the loudest thing in the film.

The film is not without its missteps. A couple of music choices push too hard at moments that are already doing their own work. A journalist scribbling "So much wreckage" in his notebook is the kind of on-the-nose gesture that a film this intelligent should have caught in the edit. Holbrook's Lou occasionally overwhelms the film's careful balance, his trauma more theatrical than the sober register around him can comfortably accommodate. These are real complaints, and they keep the film from fully achieving what it is reaching for.

But we are Americans sitting in a Cannes theater watching a film about what America did in Iraq, and we want to say this plainly: it matters that this film exists. It matters that it begins in Baghdad and not in a stateside VA hospital. It matters that it asks, out loud and without flinching, whether a soldier's need for forgiveness is a burden that should fall on the people his country harmed. It does not answer that question cleanly. It should not. The fact that it refuses the clean answer is the most honest thing about it.

We walked out of our second film of day four into the Cannes afternoon feeling the particular gravity of a film that took its subject seriously and mostly earned the right to do so. Mostly. Hiam Abbass does something in the final scene that we are still thinking about. We expect we will be for a while.

🍿 SCORE = 77/100