USA Trailer #2 (2 min 20 sec):

(Trailer can be downloaded as MP4, WMV and MPG)

“No matter how hard I work I can’t make up for what I did.” About the same time that we hear these words we see a pair of hands being vigorously scrubbed as if trying to remove some deep stain. Indeed, the speaker, eighteen-year-old Briony Tallis, has been trying to undo a terrible event she caused five years earlier. Her mistake, whether malicious or not, ruined two promising lives. How can she ever make amends for the pain and suffering she brought about?

Atonement is told in three acts. The first shows us the Tallis family in their well-to-do (especially so considering the growing threat of war) home focusing on the full bloom of love between Briony’s older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis’s housekeeper. Robbie has been taken into the family, which has paid for his university education. As the first act plays out, there is a discrepancy between what Briony sees and what really happens. It leads to Robbie’s arrest, even though the viewer knows he is innocent.

Act two moves ahead to 1940. Robbie has been paroled into the army and is trying to find his way back to safety in northern France, finally arriving at Dunkirk while the British Army is waiting to be evacuated. Before he went over, he met up again with Cecilia, who has been working as a nurse. While he’s trying to get back, Briony has also become a nurse, working at the same hospital Cecilia has worked at. Cecilia surmises that Briony has become a nurse as penance. This is when Briony says she cannot make up for what she did.

In the third act, Briony is now much older and is dying. We see how she is still trying to come to terms with the grief she created so long ago.

Like the theological concept of atonement, this film is not about cheap grace. What a meaningless story this would be if everyone just let bygones be bygones and told Briony “It’s okay, you didn’t mean any harm.” Instead, this story takes a much harder route in the search of redemption.

Twentieth Century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of the difference between cheap and costly grace:

[Cheap] grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost!

In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. . .

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Briony is not looking for cheap grace. Her whole life is filled with contrition although that never brings the comfort she seeks. She understands that grace must be sought again and again. There is no end to the guilt that has defined her life, at least as long as she has her memory. Only at the very end is there a hint of mercy coming into Briony’s life, and even that is a very hard mercy. Thus we learn that her sin in act one not only ruined the lives of Robbie and Cecilia, but her own life as well.

Atonement serves as a reminder of how hard it is to find the redemption we need. The sins of our past never go away. Our guilt lives with us. If we take the concept of grace seriously, our lives are not the undoing of our sins but, as with Briony becoming a nurse, the penance as we seek atonement.

The second verse of the old hymn “Rock of Ages” says:

Not the labor of my hands
can fulfill thy law’s demands;
could my zeal no respite know,
could my tears forever flow,
all for sin could not atone;
thou must save and thou alone.

Briony (and we) learn that that no matter how much we do, or how hard we scrub, or how we try to make things right, we will always come up short. But that is the cost we pay to find the true meaning of grace that in the end gives us mercy.