Writing for the Movies: Writing and Screening 'Atonement' (2007)

Abstract

Despite the collaborative nature of the film industry and the importance of screenplays as commodities of vital importance to the successful realization of marketable film products, the role of the screenwriter is both historically and contemporaneously superseded by that of the director. The pseudo authorship of films is generally accredited to directors, especially in the field of literary adaptation to screen, where there seems to be a conscious desire to replace one kind of legitimized 'authorship' with another. However, Universal's 2007 film, 'Atonement', offers a working model of screenwriting and directorial synergy of the kind that results in collaborative cinematic adaptation of the highest order. Using Christopher Hampton's screenplay as a structural narrative template, director Joe Wright reconfigures Ian McEwan's novel to screen ensuring, through the visual and aural signs of cinema, a filmic realization of the thematic preoccupations of McEwan's prose. Given the moral complexities of a novel like 'Atonement' (2001) it is easy to categorize it as either a text which falls into the realms of the so-called unfilmable book, or one that requires radical reworking in order to 'fit' the narrative expectations of mainstream cinema. But like the novel from which it is adapted, 'Atonement' (2007) attains a postmodern playfulness that invests the cinematic narrative with ambiguity, reiterating in a cinematic context the novel's debates about 'authorship,' aesthetics, and audience reception.