I would never assemble a year-end list to support some kind of thesis. But looking over my ten favorite movies of 2007—Atonement, Away From Her, Gone Baby Gone, In the Valley of Elah, Into Great Silence, Lake of Fire, My Kid Could Paint That, Reservation Road, Strange Culture, and Things We Lost in the Fire—I’m struck by how many of them turn on the question of responsibility. In some cases they’re about people weighing their responsibility to others; in some cases they highlight our responsibility to larger ideals. That may sound unbearably heavy, yet all these movies lifted me up, which is a revelation in itself: maybe the things we choose to shoulder are what make life worth living.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
On the national stage, of course, 2007 was a year in which no one wanted to take the rap for anything. Convicted of lying under oath in the CIA leak case, Scooter Libby got his sentence commuted by President Bush, who effectively said that Libby was guilty but shouldn’t do time. Bill Clinton tried to rewrite history by claiming he’d been against the Iraq war all along, and Barack Obama, hammering Hillary Clinton for her Senate vote that labeled Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group, conveniently omitted the fact that he’d blown off the vote himself. But the sorriest spectacle of the year may have been captured in Charles Ferguson’s excellent documentary No End in Sight, when Paul Hughes and Walt Slocombe, U.S. officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority, pass the buck back and forth over who decided to disband the Iraqi army.
The same sense of guilt propels Joe Wright’s polished period drama Atonement, though in this case a child’s actions have momentous repercussions for an adult. The main character is an overimaginative 13-year-old who falsely accuses her older sister’s lover of rape; he spends the next five years in prison, and the balance of the movie follows his accuser into adulthood and then old age as she longs, but never quite manages, to make things right. Atonement has collected so many rapturous reviews and award nominations that a backlash can’t be far off, but it’s too layered to be dismissed as tony Oscar bait; its historical sweep, nuanced characterization, and literary intelligence are almost perfectly aligned. None of that would matter, though, if the protagonist didn’t feel such a desperate need to make amends.
