‘Atonement’ takes 5 1/2-minute shot at history

updated 2:42 p.m. ET Dec. 26, 2007

NEW YORK - The story of the long tracking shot would be best told in one take.

Our camera could begin with Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil,” pass through Jean-Luc Godard’s “Week End” and Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” and finally arrive at the latest installment in the canon: Joe Wright’s “Atonement.”

Through cinema history, audacious, lengthy tracking shots have captivated filmmakers and movie buffs who marvel at their grace and choreography. In a medium predicated on storytelling through the juxtaposition of images, the long tracking shot is the cinematic equivalent of a no-hitter in baseball: rare, untouched, and very difficult to pull off.

In the middle of “Atonement,” a 5 1/2-minute shot unfolds as Robbie, a British WWII soldier (James McAvoy), comes upon France’s Dunkirk beach, where the final point in the British retreat from the Germans is portrayed as a grim circus of defeat and chaos.

In the Ian McEwan novel from which the movie was adapted, the scene is described in just a few pages. McEwan writes: “It was a rout and this was its terminus.” On film, though, it took a lot more doing.

The scene was composed with 1,000 extras, a number of horses and vehicles on the beach, and (digitally added) ships off the coast. It all cost a sizable chunk of the film’s estimated $30 million production budget and had to be shot in one day.

That’s how long the hundreds of extras were available for, and that small time frame is what initially drove Wright and his director of photography, Seamus McGarvey, to stage the single long shot, rather than squeeze in a dozen separate setups.

“It was conceived out of necessity,” said Wright in a recent interview. “We had one day with the extras and then the small issue of the tide coming in and washing away the entire set.”

While the tide was out and the light was right, Wright and his crew managed three and a half takes — the fourth finally exhausting Steadicam operator Peter Robertson. (They used the third take.)

During production on other scenes, Robertson’s course was mapped out, meandering through the shambled beach — sometimes on foot, sometimes riding on a motorized cart.

“When we were making it, I didn’t see it in the context of the classic tracking shot, or the history of great tracking shots,” said Wright, whose “Pride & Prejudice” included a long shot, as did his British TV film “Charles II.” “It felt much, much smaller than that.”

But of course, the shot has been received precisely in that context.

Variety deputy editor Anne Thompson blogged: “This shot has its admirers and detractors. It’s a stunning shot, but does it take the viewer out of the movie, or serve a dramatic purpose? ... I for one get a kick out of bravura shots like this, whether it’s Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Robert Altman, Orson Welles, Antonioni or Alfonso Cuaron.”

Perhaps the highest possible praise for such cinematic devices would echo that of umpires in baseball — they’re doing their job well when no one even notices them.

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, however, said the “Atonement” shot’s only impression is: “‘Wow, that’s quite a tracking shot,’ when it should be ‘My God, what a horrible experience that must have been.”’

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