Atone for your assumptions...

Right now I've got Atonement playing in the background. Thanks to Netflix I get to give it another glance.

It is an epic-style movie with a lot to digest, but the themes are universal: making quick judgments, making assumptions with missing information, being stubborn about those assumptions, and then suffering the consequences and oft times making others suffer along with you.

In this case, those actions are all the result of 13 year-old Briony Tallis, the youngest of 3 who grows up in a monstrous estate in the English countryside. She's lonely, she's at an impressionable age, she longs to be part of grown-up things, she's a bit of a control freak, and she has a vivid imagination. Four events occur to create what she thinks happened one evening in the house: a play she wrote was never performed, she witnesses a flirtatious scene between her sister and a servant's son, later she witnesses a sexual scene between the two, and she witnesses a rape. Perhaps because her play was never performed, she created a real-life one of her own because she does say that " a play depends on other people..."

It is a lesson for all of us when we make snap judgments. We don't have the luxury of having the film rewound to show what really happened or having the blanks filled in to show the pieces of information Briony lacked while making her assumptions.

Briony, who is played by 3 stellar actresses at different ages, spends the rest of her life trying to atone for her childhood foolishness. Those who suffered at her hands have their lives changed forever as well.

Saiorse Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave do an amazing job as the 3 Brionys at ages 13, 18, and 77, respectively. You are convinced you are watching the same person growing, learning, repenting, and trying to make things right over her lifetime.

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley (both superb) are the long-suffering couple who fall victim to Briony's imagination and stubbornness, despite that fact that they are probably her 2 favorite people. What do they say? You always hurt the ones you love? Why is that? Is it because we feel like we know them perhaps better than we do? Is it because our emotional investment in our loved ones makes us put on blinders? This film raises those questions.

Set against the backdrop of World War 2 and its ravaging effects on England, Atonement shows what MAY have happened, what DID happen, and what COULD have happened. And it does these in a beautiful and compelling way. I have new respect for this film.