All goes downhill after Cecelia's jealous younger sister Briony witnesses a rape and vindictively fingers Robbie as the culprit. He's off to prison, leaving the family in a ruin of guilt and recrimination, just as WWII arrives to make the situation even messier.
The movie's opening scenes are quite good, and, given the context, unexpectedly funny. Wright finds a visual language to make sense of McEwan's tricky narrative, which often shows us different versions of the same scene.
There is psychological clarity as well - Robbie and Cecelia on the throbbing threshold of a forbidden relationship, little Briony feeling her first crush turn to betrayal. Brenda Blethyn has a small, vivid role as Robbie's servant mom, who can't quite summon the words to express her misgivings about his naive belief in social mobility.
Once, however, Robbie heads to prison and, through conscription, to WWII, the characters separate and the emotional juice created by their prickly proximity drains from the film. Robbie is trapped in Dunkirk, the estranged sisters in different sectors of London.
Wright attempts to compensate for the growing slackness with mighty, Oscar-ish flourishes of music, sound (the banging of a manual typewriter sounds like a gunshot, which is probably the point) and photography, the highlight being Robbie's surreal journey through the confusion of the massive Dunkirk evacuation.
Wright also nods to great movies about lovers separated by wartime - the streetcar scene from "Dr. Zhivago," the big pullback showing us besieged Atlanta in "Gone With the Wind." These comparisons only underscore the degree to which the epic love between Robbie and Cecelia is something referred to rather than felt.
