Atonement Movie

Joe Wright moved seamlessly from a BAFTA-winning career as a television director into feature films with "Pride & Prejudice" in 2005. His follow-up, like "Pride" starring Keira Knightley, takes on an only slightly less daunting source than Jane Austen: Ian McEwan's enormously popular novel "Atonement." The director doesn't face these challenges alone, however. His creative team has stayed largely intact throughout his career. ? "We're all kind of jamming together," said Wright.

As one half of the fatalistic couple at the tragic heart of "Atonement," director Joe Wright's adaptation of Ian McEwan's complex, decade-spanning novel, James McAvoy looks every inch the classic leading man -- even if McAvoy himself doesn't happen to agree. "I'm 5 foot 7, and I've got pasty white skin," he insists. "I don't think I'm ugly, don't get me wrong, but I'm not your classic lead man, Brad Pitt guy."

Re-creating period clothes is one thing. Giving them a modern glow without jarring the audience out of a particular moment in time requires a particularly nuanced hand. British costume designer Jacqueline Durran deftly juggles both charges in "Atonement," the new film from "Pride & Prejudice" director Joe Wright. Adapted from Ian McEwan's 2002 novel, the film chronicles an epic love story that begins in 1930s England and spans several decades.

Ian McEWAN'S "Atonement" is one of the more celebrated novels of the decade, and one that doesn't clearly call out for an adaptation to the screen. Looked at one way, it's a sumptuous period drama, a doomed romance or a harrowing war novel. But from another angle it's a cerebral meditation on the nature of storytelling and complicity, which is hard to translate into a visual language.

"She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so," writes Ian McEwan in his novel "Atonement." He is describing 13-year-old Briony Tallis, one of recent literature's most maddening heroines, brainy but impetuous, controlling but immature and blind to the cues of her heart and others'.