The main casualty of the film's long, murky middle and end sections is the big moral theme - and also the ingenious formal gimmick - that provides the book with some of its intensity and much of its cachet. As the title suggests, Atonement is fundamentally about guilt and the attempt to overcome it, and about the tricky, tragically imperfect power of art to compensate for real-life crimes and misdemeanors.
Without giving too much away, I will say that the power of the story depends on its believability, on the audience's ability to perceive Robbie and Cecilia in wartime as suffering, flesh-and-blood creatures. McAvoy and Knightley sigh and swoon credibly enough, but they are stymied by the inertia of the filmmaking, and by the film's failure to find a strong connection between the fates of the characters and the ideas and historical events that swirl around them.
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