Never Let Me Go Grabs Hold but Not Tightly
Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) grew up together at Hailsham Academy, a British school for children without mothers, without fathers but who were not orphans. They bonded over those years, striking up a connection that would remain with them into adulthood; a connection completely different from the ones all of the random, everyday people who surround them would ever be able to understand.
Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield in Never Let Me Go © Fox Searlight Films
Based on the extraordinary novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) and working from a screenplay by Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Sunshine),
director Mark Romanek’s (One Hour Photo) Never Let Me Go isn’t a movie easy to boil down into narrative simplicities. While it isn’t complicated, the emotional story it tells is set in an alternative Twentieth Century reality where Cancer is an afterthought and people routinely live into their hundreds. The central trio are key reasons this is so, all of them navigating waters plotted out for them before their births trying to come to grips with a life dedicated to serving others who routinely treat them as aliens.
Ishiguro’s book told this story with remarkable eloquence. It reduced me to blubbering tears a few pages before the end, the author subtly developing his narrative in a way that continually surprised. The twists and turns were delivered with an astonishing simplicity that snuck right up on me almost as if it were a half-remembered dream told by a narrator afraid she and her friends would be a forgotten afterthought in a world that already barely recognized their existence.
Garland’s script emulates this approach best it can, while Romanek attempts to convey the emotional crescendos with a visually sparse beauty matching the almost ethereal lives of the protagonists. Who Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are and the reasons for their importance are delivered with matter-of-fact unfussiness, a line of dialogue here or the image of a carefully placed scar there telling viewers all they need to know. Every now and then a look of disgust or fear will pass over the face of a random passerby making the ones of compassion and tenderness from an even smaller group all the more poignant and powerful.
But where the film comes short is truly connecting with its central figures. Had I not read the book, had I not understood the complexity of their relationship, had I not known so much about Hailsham and the importance of sales and of not smoking and of keeping healthy and not being able to get pregnant and how none of the students would ever be actors or shopkeepers or professional athletes or common day laborers going in, I’m not entirely sure I’d have been willing to follow things to their inevitable conclusions. There is almost too much hinting going on, too much minimalism, the characters never quite achieving a three dimensional status which would make their plights, and their subdued reactions to them, fully resonate.
Said reactions are where I think many people are sadly going to have an adverse reaction. A typical gut response when faced when an unthinkable destiny is to revolt once the facts are known. When Logan new people were dying at 30 for no purpose he attempted to bring down the system. When the clones living inside an idyllic playground in
