How Can a Film Ever Do a Book Justice?

Ian MacEwan is one of the rare writers who enjoys both commercial success and critical respect. The opening of the film adaptation of “Atonement,” in theatres today, will likely lure many new readers to the printed version of MacEwan’s romance. But could it possibly satisfy the novel’s existing readers?

The film version is directed by Joe Wright, best known for his recent adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” which, like this flick, also starred Keira Knightley. As a fan of neither Keira’s wolfish style of beauty nor her interpretation of Elizabeth Bennet, I was originally reluctant to see the Wright-Knightley duo assault another one of my favorite books.

Many would claim that, with “Pride and Prejudice,” Wright successfully dealt with the doubly difficult task of interpreting an iconic book and remaking a cult classic film (the BBC version with a famously shirtless, young, and hot Colin Firth). And by any measurement, “Pride and Prejudice” wasn’t a bad movie, though the final scenes took the romance to nauseatingly clichéd levels with a never-ending sunset kiss that caused my date to walk out of the theatre in disgust.

Those who disliked “Pride and Prejudice,” both critics and viewers, tended to be avid Austenites. An L.A. Weekly critic complained that “Knightley plays Lizzie as, of all things, a head-tossing daddy’s girl,” while a close friend (and fellow English concentrator) disdainfully referred to Wright’s interpretation as “Brontë-esque.”

Though we expressed it differently, we all had the same essential problem with the film—it just didn’t feel like the book. With novels like “Pride and Prejudice,” that are returned to again and again, the imagined world becomes increasingly concrete with each reading. Enduring Wright’s emotional crescendos and Knightley’s excessive giggling was the equivalent of a siege on the city of Austen we had built. The problem wasn’t with the movie, but with the gap between the movie and our beloved book.

Luckily, Ian MacEwan is not Jane Austen, and the adaptation of “Atonement” seems destined for a better end. The younger, more capricious Cecilia Tallis is a much better match for Knightley than the wry Elizabeth Bennet. The World War II backdrop and brief scenes of passion, as well as the quality of MacEwan’s prose, all lend themselves well to Wright’s eye for lush cinematography and emotional bravado.

In many ways “Atonement” promises to harken back to the great literary adaptations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Ismail Merchant and James Ivory adapted several classic British novels to the big screen. While the worse of these ended up being tedious opulent excess, the best, like 1992’s “Howard’s End” or 1985’s “A Room with a View,” captured the ambiance of the novel with rich historical detail and powerhouse acting. It remains to be seen how closely the script mirrors the book (Wright had significant modifications made to the original screenplay adaptation by Christopher Hampton), but if “Pride and Prejudice” is any indicator, any departures that Wright makes will not be in plot detail, but in mood.

Though devoted readers want a mirror image of the novel they know, that’s not always the goal of the director. Wright’s “Pride and Prejudice” was a failure for me, but for many other, more open-minded viewers he invigorated a worn and familiar story. Sometimes it’s necessary for an adaptation to be less true to the book if it is to succeed in its new medium. With “Atonement,” Wright may have found a story that can bridge the two media without any such sacrifice.

—Staff writer Madeline K.B. Ross can be reached at mross@fas.harvard.edu.