Keira Knightley shines in Atonement
Jill Lawless

LONDON - Keira Knightley has come of age. The 22-year-old star, who played a soccer-loving teenager in “Bend it Like Beckham” and a swashbuckling gentlewoman in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, enters a world of adult sacrifice and betrayal in “Atonement.” In the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, Knightley plays Cecilia Tallis, the bored and brittle daughter of a wealthy English family, who’s frittering away a hot 1930s summer after finishing college. Her emerging romance with a housekeeper’s son is destroyed by a lie told by her younger sister — a fiction that transforms the lives of all three central characters.
The film, already being talked up as an Academy Awards contender, is likely to be a turning point for Knightley, co-star James McAvoy and director Joe Wright. For Wright, who also directed Knightley in 2005’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and McAvoy — last seen as the Scottish doctor befriended by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland” — it could open doors in Hollywood. For Knightley, already a big enough star to be a target for paparazzi and the tabloid press, it provided a chance to play a flawed adult character after a string of ingenues.
“I was interested by the fact that she really isn’t very nice at the beginning,” Knightley told reporters. “She’s a snob. I think she’s probably a good person, but she’s at a point in her life where she’s sort of aware of her privilege but completely directionless. I was fascinated by this woman who is emotionally repressed and yet the emotions are bubbling away under the surface and just waiting to explode.” The dresses aren’t bad either. “Atonement” had a modest budget of about $30 million, but it looks expensive, and the period costumes are luscious. “It was like stepping into all my favourite ‘30s and ‘40s movies, and feeling like a film star,” Knightley said. “It was great.”
Stiff upper lips, country houses, pretty frocks — so far, so Merchant-Ivory. But viewers expecting “Atonement” to provide two hours of languid aristocrats, sun-drenched lawns and Architectural Digest interiors are in for a shock. Knightley says the opening scenes — shot with a hazy, nostalgic glow by Wright and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey — “lull the audience into a false sense of security.” “You think it is going to be one sort of film, and then” — in a scene that turns on the accidental sending of a sexually explicit letter — “that preconceived notion of what the film will be is exploded.”
Although it has been billed as a classic British romance, “Atonement” stays true to the spirit — and the looping, sophisticated structure — of McEwan’s acclaimed novel, a meditation on the power of stories to hurt and to heal. The central character is Briony, the precocious child whose imagination causes calamity and who grows up to be a successful novelist. She’s played on film by three actresses — Vanessa Redgrave, Romola Garai and 13-year-old Saoirse Roman. “Ian would constantly remind me that this isn’t a love story,” said Wright. “It is a film about a writer and a writer’s imagination.”
The chief victim of that imagination is Robbie Turner, the Cambridge-educated working-class boy whose dreams of a bright future are shattered by the child’s accusation. McAvoy’s subtle performance an Robbie anchors the film, and dominates its quietly devastating central section, a recreation of the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940. But while the 28-year-old McAvoy may be bound for stardom. Knightley is already there. She regularly graces magazine covers and succeeded Kate Moss as the face of Chanel fragrance Coco Mademoiselle. She has been pursued by paparazzi, and recently sued a British newspaper after it said she had an eating disorder.
But Knightley — daughter of an actor and a writer — says she has not lost her love of the movies. She is currently back in period costume as the spirited and unconventional Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, an 18th century ancestor of Princess Diana, in “The Duchess,” scheduled for release next year.