Watch
the Atonement trailer
In the blue corner! Boasting a string of heavy-hitting stage and screen
credits, a deft range and a quirky killer smile, and weighing in at whatever
it takes, it’s the 25-year-old London Lightning Bolt, RRRRRRomola Garai!!!
And in the red corner? It’s that skinny star with the squeaky voice, Keira
Knightley.
See! This is just the sort of thing that drives Romola Garai crazy. “Lazy,
salacious, journalistic nonsense” is how she describes the concerted media
effort to pitch her, tooth’n’claw, up against her alleged arch-rival and Pirates
of the Caribbean pin-up Knightley. The two have apparently been
scrapping over choice roles for years.
The epic television adaptation of Dr Zhivago and the Oscar-nominated Pride
and Prejudice were just two of the titles that launched Garai and
Knightley into a casting head-to-head (and though Garai lost out to
Knightley in both, one heavyweight critic was smart enough to note that
Garai’s competing epic Daniel Deronda blew Knightley’s Zhivago
off the screen). And so now that the two leading ladies, like De Niro and
Pacino in Heat, are finally appearing on screen together in a
stunningly precise adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the
temptation to reignite the duelling egos debate is overwhelming.
“But I just don’t think it’s true at all!” says a plaintive Garai, from the
corner of her hotel room in Wellington, New Zealand, halfway through an RSC
world tour of King Lear and The Seagull. “She’s a massive
movie star, and pitting us against each other is demeaning to everyone
involved.
We’re more or less the same age – I’m a few years older than her – and we do
sometimes go up for the same job. But it doesn’t really extend to anything
more exciting than that!”
And yet, if you buy the whole Knightley-Garai smackdown, there’s a certain
poetic justice to Garai’s arresting turn in Atonement. The
actress, who arrived in the mainstream with an award-winning performance in
2003’s I Capture the Castle, here plays the blue-blood Briony
Tallis, the younger, plainer sister to Knightley’s glamorous Cecilia. It’s
the eve of the Second World War, and both sisters are in love with the same
man, Robbie (James McAvoy). However, the unexpected sight of Robbie and
Cecilia in flagrante is enough to send Briony into a traumatised
tailspin, and sparks an impulsive act of revenge that will have grave
implications for those involved, and will ultimately motivate Briony’s
lifelong desire for the atonement of the title. Here, rather than fighting
against type, or competing for wattage with Knightley, Garai embraces the
strange, impenetrable otherness of Briony, complete with dowdy nurse’s
wardrobe and tortured bug-eyed stares.
“Briony’s weird,” she admits. “I wanted her to be weird, and not sexy, though.
Because if I’ve learnt one thing, at 25, it’s that what stands in your way a
lot as an actress is constant pressure on you to be beautiful – it certainly
stands in the way of properly developing a character.”
Now, this is clearly not aimed at Knightley’s babe-a-licious screen persona,
but the reality of Atonement is that, though Knightley’s performance
is a bravura depiction of tremulous unrequited love (at times veering
perilously close to an imitation of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter),
it is ultimately Garai’s turn that fascinates. She is the most modern
character in the film, defined by her own voyeuristic desires and a sense of
alienation and guilt. And in a remarkably accomplished movie that is epic in
scope, intimately dramatic, and bound to dominate the awards season, hers is
the star-making turn.
Garai, however, is typically sceptical about the promise of super-stardom. She
says that she’s been here before – Garai was deemed a hot prospect after I
Capture the Castle, called a “young Cameron Diaz” by Variety,
and again lauded after her award-winning turn as a blunt-speaking carer
opposite James McAvoy in the 2004 wheelchair drama Inside I’m Dancing. Instead,
she says, without false modesty, that she simply wants “to do the jobs that
I want to do and let the work speak for itself”. Hence the world tour with
Chekhov and Shakespeare at a time when other actresses might be, well,
pressing the flesh.
In fact, Garai is refreshingly off-message about the promotional aspects of
the movie business. She has a rapier intellect, and can deconstruct a
movie’s subtext with alarming insight – her analysis of the sexual dynamics
of Atonement would make a Freudian scholar weep with joy. But she
refuses to play compliant media ball. Thus, she’s quick to interrogate
questions, and even quicker to spot logical flaws (the suggestion that Atonement
is a vaguely “independent” movie is immediately shot down with a detailed,
and correct, account of the movie’s status, via Working Title Films and
parent company Universal, as a mainstream Hollywood effort).
This instinct, engaging and frankly innovative in a world of promotional
drones, has occasionally earned Garai the wrath of journalists, who have
been affronted by her decision to have a personality. “I don’t read
everything that’s written about me,” she says. “But it filters through. And
I know that for everybody that thinks I’m talented and promising, there is
somebody out there that thinks that I’m s***!”
Born in Hong Kong to a high-profile banker of Jewish-Hungarian descent, Garai
was raised in Singapore until the age of 8. She says that these pivotal
years abroad as the archetypal outsider have informed, if not her decision
to become an actress, then certainly the choices she has made as one.
Talent-spotted in an all-female version of Measure for Measure at the
City of London School for Girls, she was cast as a young Judi Dench in
Gillies MacKinnon’s The Last of the Blonde Bombshells.
She says that the roles since then have been defined by a lot of outsiders,
observers and writers, and often in period settings. All, like her perhaps,
are fiercely intelligent, and yet staring coolly at life from the margins.
Even in her next movie, François Ozon’s Angel, she stars
opposite Charlotte Rampling as a novelist in early 20th-century London who
has rejected reality in favour of her own fantasy world.
Yes, but how can she justify taking part in Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights?
She groans at the mere mention of that stinker, a bland prequel to the
original that was set in 1950s Cuba, co-starred Diego Luna, and flopped at
the box office. “Let’s just say that it taught me that sometimes it’s
important to lose your dignity in order to learn about how important dignity
is in your life, and leave it at that, yes?”
In the meantime Garai has decided that, finally, period stories are out, and
present is in. “I’m desperate to find a contemporary film with a character
that’s interesting, dignified and complex,” she says. “I struggle to find
those parts, and when I do, they usually go to other actresses.”
Other actresses? Aha! Not that woman again? And if so, can we not just admit,
for the sake of argument, that Garai’s show-stopping turn in Atonement
is actually the justified coup de grâce in the long-running
casting battle between her and Knightley?
“Certainly not!” she says, full beam. “And I would be hugely, furiously, angry
if that was ever suggested by anyone, and it’s certainly not something that
I believe.”
All right, you have my word – it will only be in the closing sentences.
“Oh, great,” she sighs. “I can rest easy then.”
Atonement is released on Sept 7
Mr Maher, while seemingly trying for a humerous conclusion, you have nevertheless revealed the media's drive, nay NEED, for a strong and simple conclusion, whether it reflects the truth or not. You have managed the final denoument of the article with aplomb, yet it sent shivers down my spine with its reptilian smugness.
Chris, Manchester,
Can't comment until I've seen the movie. Will pick up a copy next time I'm in BKK or HCM City. Hey, a dollar's not that much of an outlay.
Andrew Milner, Yokohama, Kanagawa