Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley in Atonement

Cast: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Benedict Cumberbatch, Vanessa Redgrave, Juno Temple, Brenda Blethyn, Harriet Walter, Jérémie Renier, Alfie Allen, Patrick Kennedy, Daniel Mays, Nonso Anozie, Gina McKee. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Paul Tothill. Music: Dario Marianelli.

Atonement -- and I'm speaking here of Joe Wright's film and not the novel by Ian McEwan on which it's based -- tries to have it both ways: It provides both a happy ending in keeping with the lush, romantic production and a bleak surprise ending perhaps truer to the epic wartime sequence that interrupts the romance. But by doing so it demonstrates that what may work on the page as a provocative fable doesn't entirely work on screen. Both film and book ask a key moral and aesthetic question: Can art provide both truth and justice? Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan as a child, Romola Garai as a young woman, Vanessa Redgrave in old age) seeks redemption for a lie, but in the end she thinks she has achieved it by lying again, by writing a work of autobiographical fiction that is untrue to what actually happened. That moral conundrum comes as a kind of surprise at the very end of Wright's film, but it's anticipated on every page of McEwan's novel, a trick that can only be pulled in literature, where the unreliable narrator is a familiar device. There's a problem, too, in visualizing McEwan's story, where both the opulent country-house setting and the portrayal of the Dunkirk retreat, with its celebrated long traveling shot, tend to overwhelm the narrative and the depiction of the characters of Briony, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and Robbie (James McAvoy). The actors, fine as they are, keep getting upstaged by the images. It's what it was called at the time, an "Oscar-bait" movie, and it won for Dario Marianelli's score, and picked up nominations for best picture, for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Ronan's supporting performance, for Seamus McGarvey's cinematography, and for art direction and costumes.

Darkest Hour (Joe Wright, 2017)

Gary Oldman and Ben Mendelsohn in Darkest Hour 

Winston Churchill: Gary Oldman
Clementine Churchill: Kristin Scott Thomas
King George VI: Ben Mendelsohn
Elizabeth Layton: Lily James
Neville Chamberlain: Ronald Pickup
Viscount Halifax: Stephen Dillane
Sir John Simon: Nicholas Jones
Anthony Eden: Samuel West
Clement Atlee: David Schofield

Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: Anthony McCarten
Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Production design: Sarah Greenwood
Film editing: Valerio Bonelli
Music: Dario Marianelli

Joe Wright's Darkest Hour starts off well as a story of backstage power plays in the runup to World War II, after Neville Chamberlain's attempts at making peace with Hitler had so notably failed. If it had stayed on this level, we might have had an absorbing drama about the way history gets shaped in secrecy, with backbiting and one-upmanship as the forces that drive the world. But instead, we have to have yet another take on Winston Churchill, and not a particularly novel one at that. Gary Oldman's Oscar-winning performance carries the movie much further than it deserves to be carried after the biopic clichés begin to fly. The most egregiously bogus moment comes near the end, when Churchill decides to ditch the car that's taking him to Westminster to deliver the decisive "never surrender" speech that puts the kibosh on Chamberlain and Halifax's desire to initiate peace talks after the disaster at Calais and the rescue from Dunkirk. So Winston, cigar protruding, descends into the Underground to talk to The British People and to get their advice on whether Britain should talk or fight. It's a badly written scene that even includes Churchill inventing that old joke about how all babies look like him. In addition to the working-class folks, there is a token black man, representing the Empire. They all assure him that they will fight them on the beaches and in the streets, and Churchill is so emboldened that he goes and tells Parliament just that. My objection is not that the scene never happened, but that the filmmakers' imaginations were so constricted that they had to invent this implausible scene to explain Churchill's overcoming his doubts and fears. Churchill was a more complicated man, and the politics surrounding him so much more intricate and fierce, than this feeble fiction suggests.

Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)

Brenda Blethyn and Keira Knightley in Pride & Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet: Keira Knightley
Mr. Darcy: Matthew Macfadyen
Mrs. Bennet: Brenda Blethyn
Mr. Bennet: Donald Sutherland
Jane Bennet: Rosamund Pike
Charles Bingley: Simon Woods
Lydia Bennet: Jena Malone
Mr. Wickham: Rupert Friend
Mr. Collins: Tom Hollander
Kitty Bennet: Carey Mulligan
Lady Catherine de Bourgh: Judi Dench
Caroline Bingley: Kelly Reilly
Mary Bennet: Talulah Riley
Charlotte Lucas: Claudie Blakley
Georgiana Darcy: Tamzin Merchant
Mr. Gardiner: Peter Wight
Mrs. Gardiner: Penelope Wilton

Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: Deborah Moggach
Based on a novel by Jane Austen
Cinematography: Roman Osin
Production design: Sarah Greenwood
Film editing: Paul Tothill
Costume design: Jacqueline Durran
Music: Dario Marianelli

Joe Wright's lush, romantic adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the ampersand belongs to the film) irked many Janeites. But people who love Austen's books are fated to be irked: There is no easy way to translate to film the narrative ironies that readers seize on with delight. Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach (with uncredited help from Emma Thompson) have crafted a Pride & Prejudice that takes place in a universe parallel to Austen's. They push back the time of the novel from the early 19th century to the late 18th. Tinkering with time is not unique to films of the novel: The 1940 version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and directed by Robert Z. Leonard moved the action up to the Victorian period, maybe to take advantage of MGM's wardrobe full of crinolines and hoop skirts. Wright's earlier time period allows  for a looser, more earthy setting, more Henry Fielding than Jane Austen. There are clotheslines and farm animals to be seen, and the first of the two balls that take place in the film is rougher, sweatier, more countrified than the elegant formal dances usually seen in period films. Elizabeth Bennet arrives at Netherfield with her hair about her ears, not neatly pinned under her bonnet. Later, she spins barefoot on a rope swing hung at the entrance to the barnyard, and at one point an enormously ungelded hog walks through the action. Even the formal dress is different: With her upswept hairdo, Judi Dench's Lady Catherine looks like she has just stepped out of a Joshua Reynolds portrait. The real strength of Wright's version is not in its fidelity to the novel, but in its creation of a satisfyingly consistent world in which it might have taken place, mutatis mutandis. There is some elegant staging: Visiting Pemberley, Elizabeth finds herself in a sculpture hall, where the nude statuary adds a frisson to her awakening attraction to Darcy. The ballroom scenes are beautifully filmed with long traveling takes among the various characters. And Dario Marianelli's score, with its suggestions of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, isn't overstated. Keira Knightley's fetching underbite  suggests Elizabeth's stubbornness and pride, and she's well-matched with Matthew Macfadyen, who has the thankless task of following in the footsteps of Olivier and Colin Firth, who became a sex symbol with his Darcy in the 1995 television series. Macfadyen is not conventionally handsome -- he's a little potato-nosed -- but that serves the character well: Darcy should not be an instant heartthrob like, for example, Mr. Wickham. There will never be a perfect film version of the novel -- for that matter, of any novel -- but Wright's Pride & Prejudice satisfies for what it is, a lesser work derived from a great source.   

Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012)

Jude Law and Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina: Keira Knightley
Alexei Karenin: Jude Law
Count Vronsky: Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Stiva Oblonsky: Matthew Macfadyen
Dolly Oblonskaya: Kelly MacDonald
Kitty Scherbatsakaya: Alicia Vikander
Konstantin Levin: Domhnall Gleeson
Countess Vronskaya: Olivia Williams
Princess Betsy: Ruth Wilson

Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey
Production design: Sarah Greenwood
Costume design: Jacqueline Durran

Anyone who wants to shake up an established film genre gets my support, even when what they do doesn't quite work. So I'm okay with what Joe Wright tries to do to the historical costume drama and the adaptation of a famous novel in his version of Anna Karenina. Which isn't to say that I think it works. What does work is the attempt by Wright and his screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, to redress the imbalance I've noted in my entries on two previous film adaptations of Tolstoy's novel, the ones directed by Clarence Brown in 1935 and Julien Duvivier in 1948: the neglect of the half of the novel that deals with Konstantin Levin. Domhnall Gleeson, the Levin of Wright's film, is hardly the Levin Tolstoy describes as "strongly built, broad-shouldered," but Gleeson seems to know what the character is about. And he's beautifully matched with Alicia Vikander, who gives another knockout performance as Kitty. Wright and Stoppard use their story as an effective foil for the obsessive, careless love of Anna and Vronsky. That it's only part of Levin's function in Tolstoy's novel, which gives us a view of Russian reform politics and social structure through Levin's eyes, just goes to show that you can't have everything when you're trying to adapt literature to a medium it isn't quite suited for. Wright has also cast brilliantly. As Karenin, Jude Law elicits sympathy for a character that can easily be reduced to a stock villain, as when Basil Rathbone played him in 1935. I also liked Matthew Macfadyen as Oblonsky, Anna's womanizing brother, and it's fun to see Macfadyen and Knightley together in completely different roles from Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, whom they played in Wright's 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. As Anna, Knightley sometimes looks a bit too much like a gaunt fashion model in the Oscar-winning costumes by Jacqueline Durran, and Taylor-Johnson lays on the preening a bit too much in his bedroom-eyed Vronsky, but they have real chemistry together. Seamus McGarvey's Oscar-nominated cinematography makes the most of Sarah Greenwood's production design. But the decision to film the story partly as as if it were being staged in some impossible, dreamlike theater, but also partly realistically, goes astray. It begins as if it were a comedy, with the philandering Oblonsky sneaking around from his wife both onstage and backstage. And throughout the film, reversions from realistic settings to the theater keep jarring the overall tone. There are occasionally some spectacular uses of the set, as when the horses in Vronsky's race run across a proscenium stage, and in his accident, horse and rider plunge off the stage. Here and elsewhere, Greenwood's design is extraordinarily ingenious. But the theater trope -- all the world's a stage? -- never resolves itself into anything thematically satisfying.