For admirers of Ian McEwan's shattering 2002 novel "Atonement," the prospect of adapting such a masterful piece of diamantine prose into a big-screen spectacle bespeaks temerity bordering on blasphemy.

The fiercest of McEwan's protectors may stand down.

In the almost spookily capable hands of 34-year-old director Joe Wright, the film version of "Atonement" has achieved that to which every literary adaptation should aspire. Wright uses the full cinematic palette of sound, image and performance to create a film that works both as a sweeping, old-fashioned wartime romance and as a subtle, almost postmodern meditation on narrative, truth and the by turns treacherous and consoling power of art.

From its opening shot, "Atonement" announces its intention to play with the contingent nature of perception: As typewriter keys clack with foreboding, an English stately home comes into view. Only when the camera pulls back is it revealed to be a dollhouse that belongs to "Atonement's" fascinating protagonist, 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan). It's 1935, and the Tallises have gathered for a quiet summer weekend, but by the end of the day, the family's aristocratic veneer of louche entitlement and composure will be smashed, only to be hastily patched up.

When Briony observes her beautiful sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), suddenly jump into a fountain while the caretaker's son, Robbie (James McAvoy), looks on, Briony doesn't see youthful impetuousness. She sees something forbidden and threatening, which is how she will read and report all that comes later. Those events will take Briony, Cecilia and Robbie to World War II and even the present day, as that summer weekend reverberates in a series of excruciating twists.

Wright has found the pitch-perfect cast, from Ronan to the radiant, sylphlike Knightley, who says little but conveys volumes as a woman in the throes of longing. McAvoy, who made his mark in "The Last King of Scotland," becomes a bona-fide leading man, his virility in early scenes later giving way to an even more appealing sensitivity.

Nothing comes easily in "Atonement," especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.