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Never Let Me Go
| Released |
11 February 2011 |
| Director |
Mark Romanek |
Starring
|
Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley |
| Writer(s) |
Alex Garland |
| Producer(s) |
Andrew MacDonald, Allon Reich |
| Origin |
United Kingdom, United States |
| Running Time |
105 minutes |
| Genre |
Drama, romance |
| Rating |
15A |
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Not so Brave New World.
Over the last few months, Never Let Me Go has been one of the few movies over whose release I've had genuine excitement. Apart from the great casting; Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield as the adult Kathy, Ruth and Tommy respectively, the team behind the production are practically a super group of talent and acclaim. Screenwriter Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Sunshine) adapts novelist Kazuo Ishiguro's (Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled) sixth book while Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) directs.
So....., as I said, a fan of all three and in particular the novels of Ishiguro, I've been quite excited.
And did the excitement last? Well, no, it was short lived, usurped by other concerns, and it really wasn't the right emotion to entertain about a film like Never Let Me Go in any case. Maudlin might've been closer, or perhaps, if I really wanted to push the boat out, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (a sense of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.) But whatever the right word might've been I left the cinema, in short, feeling sad. And rest assured you will also find Never Let Me Go sad. Imitation of Life sad. Even Brief Encounter sad. But before you decide to definitely never watch this film despite the subject matter Never Let Me Go somehow manages to avoid the high crime of being Dancer in the Dark depressing.
And the Sirkian reference is perhaps a good way to grasp the essence of a film like Never Let Me Go, a film as abundant in visual metaphor, allegory and conscious style as any of the old Douglas Sirk melodramas. Yet it would also be a mistake to regard Never Let Me Go as melodrama plain and simple. Maybe melodrama dressed up as sci-fi. For one it's set in an alternate England just twenty years shy of contemporary times (or the 1990s as they're more commonly known) and for another it concerns thematics that have been covered by every sci-fi writer from Aldous Huxley to Philip K. Dick. And before I go any further, while Never Let Me Go isn't one of those films predicated entirely on the value of a handful of paltry plot twists, it'd still be a poor show to give away all of the various plot points, so I won't. Least to say, that Never Let Me Go is melancholia distilled in film format and like the best science fiction is really a reflection of those matters which concern us all; life, love and death.
Nothing is exactly what it seems in the idyllic private boarding school of Hailsham where a young Kathy, Tommy and Ruth grow up. It is the only home that they've ever known and it's where a complex love triangle develops whose effect will last the entirety of their lives. Mystery permeates Hailsham's verdant environs and what initially seems like privilege turns out to be something else indeed. Headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) stresses the children's importance to society a little too fervently, and then there's the perplexing purpose of the enigmatic Madame's gallery of the children's collected craftwork. But even when an impassioned teacher (played by the always wonderful Sally Hawkins) reveals Hailsham's secret to them, the children accept everything without even a hint of weary resignation.
In full knowledge, life goes on, and after Hailsham the now grown teens instead sojourn at the rural homestead called The Cottages. But there seems nothing left for the trio but to await 'completion' and as the country manses and village life evocative of a much earlier ‘40s wartime England disappear and the brutalist architecture of the tower block and the steely purgatorial hallways of hospitals become more apparent, it's difficult not to sense a longing for a time gone by or a childhood innocence lost in the cinematography. Are Kathy, Tommy and Ruth in control of their lives? Do they want to be? What is immortality?
Many of the criticisms of Never Let Me Go will be the same as those levelled at Ishiguro's novel in 2005, but the central and even periphery performances are masterfully engaging, the cinematography engrossing and the story weighty, meaningful and important. If you happen by the cinema, call in, and you won't regret it.
- Cormac O'Brien |
