Hot off a cheeky rendition of Pride and Prejudice and before beginning his alarming next project (a DreamWorks biopic about a homeless, schizophrenic cellist), director Joe Wright has made a loyal adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel that is also incontrovertibly his own. For the first hour, set in a prewar English country house, it's faultless: a pungent stew of pleasure and dread, shrill suspicions and pouting revenge.
Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a pale-haired child looking almost spectral in her shapeless white dress, has written a play called The Trials of Arabella—the over- heated title tells us all we need to know about the direction her imagination tends. Briony is hoping her cousins, who are coming to live with her family in the wake of a divorce, will agree to perform it for her visiting brother. Meanwhile, Briony's snotty older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is preparing for his arrival by filling an antique vase at a fountain. A sexually charged altercation with her childhood friend and social inferior Robbie (James McAvoy) ends with a section of the vase in the bottom of the basin. Cecilia strips down to her underwear and dives in to retrieve it, humiliating Robbie—and stupefying her baby sister, who is watching the silent scene from a window, unobserved.
As Cecilia and Robbie's animal affair staggers forward, Briony continues intercepting half-understood crumbs of information. Her surveillance is clearly biased: Robbie once rebuffed Briony's childish declaration of love, and an older sister can do no wrong. Faced with evidence of mutual provocation, she assigns all the desire to Robbie. Robbie, now burdened with twice the sex drive of a normal human being, starts to look to Briony like a "maniac." So when a redheaded cousin named Lola (Juno Temple) is raped and Briony catches a glimpse of the perpetrator, she knows—she convinces herself—that she has identified the man responsible. But she has not, and Robbie and Cecilia will suffer for her misplaced conviction.
The film's casting is brilliant, the production design impeccable, the point-of-view switchbacks beautifully turned. Best of all, though, is a fearsome sense of forward momentum that lets us know something ugly is at work, waiting for the little girl to sin. Sloughing off the novel's pretentious narration—a pastiche of Mrs. Dalloway that turns even less agreeable once McEwan blames a grown-up Briony for writing it—the film nonetheless bows to his conceit with an ingenious bit of sound design. The percussive clatter of typewriter keys and the triumphant zip and clang of a carriage return are introduced with the title sequence; for the rest of the movie they'll recur, neatly timed to the visual action, a reminder of Briony's furious drive for absolution.
The rest of the movie is carried by this virtuosic opening section, but it never quite kicks in a motor of its own. World War II begins and Robbie, fresh from prison and an object of the film's bottomless pity, is a prince among enlisted soldiers. He speaks to frightened Frenchmen in their own language and wanders through picturesque dawn mists right out of Pride & Prejudice. The central set piece—a single long Steadicam shot through the masses of men waiting to be evacuated at Dunkirk—is wondrous but nonetheless wrong. War isn't Steadicam, at least according to McEwan. War is tedium; war is hell. Wright's pretty nightmare (a Ferris wheel looms forlornly over the beach) is in keeping with the swirling style established by the opening section, but not its perverse spirit.
In the third section, Briony (now played by a repentant Romola Garai), having deferred her writing ambitions, follows her sister's lead and becomes a probationary nurse. Again, the memory of Briony's childhood ferocity is what feeds this sequence; Garai, despite indelible appearances in otherwise forgettable movies like Amazing Grace and Vanity Fair, is just along for the ride. Likewise, a stagy coda with Vanessa Redgrave as the elderly Briony is a simple placeholder, allowing you to soak in your fury about injustice and thwarted love for a few more delicious minutes.
These later sections are disappointing in retrospect, but they're not entirely wrongheaded. While you're watching, a haze of outrage at Briony's actions mixed with—oh, admit it—a drop of sympathy for her immature passion sweeps you right through to the end of the film. And doesn't it seem right that the world after her fall would be made of weaker, paler stuff than the perfection that preceded it? 
