|
 Sumptuous
in its beauty and ponderous in meaning, Never Let Me Go features some of
the finest performances of the year by its three young leads, Carey
Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley. The only issue with the
film is its refusal to simplify the adaptation of Kazuo Ishigoro’s
surreal story of love, envy, friendship and loss, opting instead to
retain the veils over his narrative, making nothing easily plain. Even
the exact determination as to the identity of our characters is vague
nearly to distraction.
A
story of another reality similar to ours, but surely not ours, is it? A
world too ghastly and heart wrenching to contemplate, but not terribly
incomprehensible. It’s nearly impossible to relate the plot without
giving away secrets and Never Let Me Go reveals its precious few
illuminations like the slow peeling of an onion, layer after layer,
deliberate and studied. We are given rare glimpses through the haze of
atmosphere so carefully structured around a boarding school as seen in
flashback through the eyes of Kathy M., one of its graduates. Kathy
regales us with the story of her life for as far back as she can
remember it alongside her two best friends, Ruth, and Kathy’s misfit
crush, Tommy. Growing up in the English countryside, sheltered by a
combination of fear and innocence, the students of the Hailsham School
all know they are special; they’re told as much many times a day by
their headmistress. Why exactly doesn’t bear too much notice until a
young teacher -- the latest through a revolving door of educators --
finds too much amiss and in a career-killing gesture attempts to remove
the wool from over her pupil’s eyes. It’s the first real sense of
unsurety or disquiet these children have ever known. Kathy’s group of
Hailsham students, like any other schoolkids have their petty cliques
complete with unnecessary cruelties and jealousies. Despairing of
Tommy’s being singled out for bullying and ridicule by the other kids
for no apparent reason, Kathy’s tender heart breaks through Tommy’s
loneliness. All seems bright and rosy until Ruth covets their happiness
and runs interference between the budding young couple. Still, it’s not
like Kathy has anyplace else to go, so year after year she watches the
pair draw ever closer until it’s time for them to prepare to take their
assigned places in society. Old enough now to head out in the world and
meet a few others already trained for their futures in their same way;
the three finally question their very existences. This venture outside
the hermetically sealed lives they lived at Hailsham even causes the
trio to look at their relationships with new eyes, igniting a light of
hope that the fate long planned for them might not be the one they
follow or perhaps at least not for a little while.
Existentialist theatre, this. If you’re looking for car chases and
glorious explosions, move onward. The pyrotechnics in Never Let Me Go
lie in its compelling performances by Mulligan, Garfield and Knightley
as Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, respectively. In this story of friendship,
love and unavoidable farewells, the young actors don’t make a single
false step. The childish selfishness of Ruth’s boy stealing, the
disillusionment and constant heartache so visible in Kathy’s eyes as she
amiably cuts bits of her heart out, forced to be among the pair every
day and Tommy’s utter obliviousness to the havoc he’s caused between the
two friends all ring true. Once out in society, the three are
frightened as deer in headlights when faced with a situation as
commonplace as ordering breakfast at a diner. Whilst adding levity,
those scenes show how intensely isolated the group has always been from
the rest of the world and it makes their inevitable separation even more
significant. Kathy, finally at her breaking point emotionally splits up
the troika to branch out on her own as much as she can, working as a
“carer” in the English health system, gently easing special patients
eventually, inexorably into the hereafter.
There
is a logical question which looms over Never Let Me Go and settles into
the corner of the frames like a five hundred pound gorilla. A “Why
don’t they?” that is often hard to ignore as there’s never much
exposition about the reasons why anything happens in the film. If one
can let go of that earthbound thought, one can enjoy this ethereal
film. I’m not sure the majority of moviegoers will be able to put it
aside and thereby risk missing the point of this study of a decades-long
friendship and the deep love born out of those bonds, which is no matter
how much time one has, there’s never time enough, so live and love for
today the best way you can. Those who might have felt the last Ishiguro
adaptation, 1993’s The Remains of the Day was too subtle or remote for
their tastes will be pulling their hair out with Never Let Me Go, but
had the characters’ backgrounds or lifetime itineraries had been more
obvious, this might have turned into another film entirely. Mark
Romanek directs this high-wire act to an outcome that seems exactly as
he intended. The cinematography of Never Let Me Go is even more
breathtaking than its acting; giving us scenes inside the bucolic
boarding school and later in the hospitals so vivid one can practically
smell the varnish on the wooden banisters and antiseptic in the wards.
The views of the English countryside and beaches are alternately
sun-bleached or gray and damp with a frequent haze no matter what the
weather, adding to the dreamlike, surreal quality of the film. The wide
landscape shots of characters alone at the edge of a long shore, or on
city streets where they are often the only commuters emphasises the
groups’ real isolation and alien-ness from the rest of the world from
which they were so zealously hidden.
Being
such a thing of dreamy imagery and subtle notions, once seen, Never Let
Me Go lingers in the eye more as time passes and gently haunts like a
sad, benevolent spirit. It is a gorgeous film with powerful
performances all around and deserves to be remembered come awards
season.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
Sept
15th, 2010
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