Atone-meh-nt

The gentleman caller and I took in what the commercials tell me is THE GREATEST MOVIE OF THIS OR ANY OTHER YEAR! last night.

I didn't care for it.

It's pretty to look at. It's obviously very well made. But, clearly, my tastes are less sophisticated than those of movie critics, and I was more concerned with the fact that it was very long, quite depressing, and did not make me care about the characters.

It starts out promisingly, if slowly, as an inter-war English-country-house drama--but pervy. In the beginning, it seemed very complex and finely layered, one of those movies where you slowly find out about the characters and their backstories, as if it's a puzzle.

But then it's not.

It doesn't answer most of the questions it asks in the first scenes; it in fact forgets about having posed them. It doesn't even bring up new questions, it just turns into a (still lushly-shot) boy-goes-to-war, boy-wants-to-come-home-to-his-girl story. And don't be fooled by the fact that it's a "war movie." It's a war movie like Gone with the Wind is a war movie. The closest thing we see to a battle is the boy traipsing through France, and even that is all about feelings and stuff.

And then the ending is pretty stupid. SPOILERS: the only thing you're really wondering about during the middle of the movie is Whether He Makes It Home Alive. Is the movie going to dish out the happy ending or the sad ending? Instead of doing either, the movie yanks us out of the 1930s, turns the main character (who you don't even see in the previews) into Vanessa Redgrave, who has written this story and who tells us that it turned out (in Vanessa's real life) not only did he die, she died too. But also that in her book, she made it into a happy ending as her way of--you guessed it!--atonement. So you get the worst of all worlds: the downer-ness of a sad ending, and the cop-out-itude of a happy one. HERE END THE SPOILERS.

So anyway, I didn't like it, and I feel perfectly justified in not liking it. My disliking it doesn't even have anything to do with the chronically overused Kiera Knightley, as she is balanced out by the adorable Mr. Tumnus (OK, James McAvoy. Whatever. He's Mr. Tumnus from here on out, as far as I'm concerned).