'Atonement' Review': Boyd Holbrook, Hiam Abbass in Reflection on War
Hiam Abbass in 'Atonement.'
Cannes Film Festival
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A commonality among most American movies about Middle Eastern wars is their strict focus on U.S. soldiers — see last year’s startlingly immersive Warfare — from the hell of active combat to years of PTSD-related psychological fallout, generally reducing the enemy to faceless “others” with neither names nor humanity. First-time feature director Reed Van Dyk establishes from the start that Atonement will veer from that course, opening on three generations of a close-knit Iraqi family, the Khachaturians, staying temporarily in the same chaotic house, ostensibly outside the conflict zone.
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While TV news coverage of airstrikes on Baghdad proclaims, “The great invader has arrived,” a young mother instructs her children not to talk to or accept anything from American soldiers they might encounter. Despite that underlying tension, kids play on the street outside while the large family has a dynamic like any other — noisily squabbling, joking, or in the case of the matriarchal grandmother, Mariam (Hiam Abbass), preparing a meal in a kitchen plagued by constant utility outages.
Atonement
The Bottom Line
Clear-eyed, even-handed and elevated by a remarkable performance.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight)
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Boyd Holbrook, Hiam Abbass, Gheed, Majd Eid, Tahseen Dahis, Gratiela Brancusi, Amanda Warren, Yara Bakri, Khris Davis
Director-screenwriter: Reed Van Dyk, adapted from the New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins
1 hour 58 minutes
It’s 2003, the early days of the Iraq War, and in a direct jab that will rankle anyone unwilling to think objectively about American interventionism, someone observes that Washington has been sounding the Weapons of Mass Destruction alarm for years: “They bomb the whole world so they can feel safe.” But although it remains regrettably timely given what’s happening in Iran, this is not a provocation intended to attribute blame, merely to show the reality of weary civilians trying to live normal lives in a city under attack.
Mariam has relatively little dialogue in this opening section, and yet her natural gravitas and intelligence signal that she will be the drama’s moral center, embodied by Abbass with quiet command. The Palestinian actress has been doing exceptional work for decades — she was divine as Logan Roy’s third wife Marcia, the coolly sophisticated Queen of Shade on Succession — but her mesmerizing performance here ranks with her very best.
She plays a woman hollowed out by the events that transpire but never numbed; even years later her eyes reveal both kindness and a lacerating pain that will be with her forever. That begins when a sudden explosion rips the side off the house. Miraculously, no one is hurt, but Mariam wastes no time marshaling them into cars to head to her home across town, away from the blast zone.
Van Dyk and his cinematographer Jon Peter handle the panic and confusion of that journey with gritty assurance. A U.S. Marine squad has taken up position at an intersection to engage in “a show of force.” Second lieutenant Lou D’Alessandro (Boyd Holbrook) is ordered to take a group of soldiers up on a roof to fire on hostile Iraqis.
As the Khachaturians’ vehicles approach, they hear the gunfire and rocket blasts but are unable to identify where the sound is coming from until they find themselves in the thick of it.
Bullets shatter the car windsscreens and soldiers yell commands, but in the clouds of dust churned up by explosions, it all happens too fast for the Marines to recognize the family as civilians. Mariam waves her grandchild’s white onesie out the window to signal peaceful compliance, but before she can stop them, her husband and two adult sons step out of the vehicles with their arms raised, shouting “Don’t shoot.”
This nerve-rattling sequence that leaves three of the Khachaturian men dead is a wrenching depiction of innocent casualties brought down by split-second combat decisions. When the men in Lou’s squad see Mariam’s wounded daughter Nora (Gheed) among the surviving passengers, holding an infant spattered with blood, they realize their mistake — in one case with delirious anguish — and quickly move the family to safety. The shock and disbelief on their faces in the hospital scene that follows is acutely distressing.
It’s at this point that New York Tim