Girl's mistake devastates through the decades

It would be the last night of Briony Tallis' childhood, that sultry summer evening in 1935 when the imaginative 13-year-old bolted from her family's baronial estate to hunt for her runaway twin cousins.

As the precocious novelist inhaled the animal smells of grazing cattle and rutting humans, she fancied she saw something not just naughty but criminal. Point of view is everything, is it not?

Atonement, Joe Wright's ravishing adaptation of Ian McEwan's exquisitely devastating 2001 novel, is about the day in the life of the Tallis family that reverberates down the century. Among other things, this bombshell of a day divides childhood from adulthood, peace from war, old classbound England from the new, democratic model. Most of all, it divides sin from expiation.

Like L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, Atonement is a genteel horror story contemplating how an innocent, Briony (played by the startlingly fine Saoirse Ronan), serves as an instrument of destruction and how this trauma defines her life.

When the housekeeper's son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), asks Briony to deliver a note to her pretty sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley), he commits the first in a series of fateful errors that will haunt both families.

Though Robbie and Cecilia are both students at Cambridge, their servant/master status at the estate makes social intercourse awkward and the other kind of intercourse forbidden. While the electricity that passes between them is grounded in mutual passion, Briony misperceives it as something dangerous and potentially lethal as a bolt of lightning.

Filmmaker Wright, whose free adaptation of Pride and Prejudice opened the parlor window on Jane Austen's novel, is scrupulously faithful to McEwan's most cinematic of books.

Through the eyes of Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, the significant shifts in the characters' perspectives are even more vivid on screen than they are on the page.

An impeccable craftsman in the tradition of David Lean, Wright possesses the late director's considerable gifts for drawing out his actors.