Starring: Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield
Directed By: Mark Romanek
Written By: Andrew Garlab, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro
Produced By: Alex Garland, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Rating: R
Running Time: Approximately 120 minutes
Website: foxsearchlight.com/neverletmego
Budget: $15,000,000
Genre: Drama/Science Fiction
Release Date: October 8, 2010
There’s something strange going on at Halisham school. Though seemingly a quaint English boarding school in the isolated English countryside, there’s something just a little off about the school and the children who stay there. Adults come and go and seem unwilling to look these children in the eyes. Peculiar etiquette lessons are held despite their not being allowed to go beyond the school’s fences for fear of death and punishment. There’s something sinister at Halisham, though the kids seem unaware of the tight, nervous leash their teachers keep them on.
Never Let Me Go is science fiction, but you wouldn’t know it to look at it. The audience is told early on that a mid-20th century scientific breakthrough has allowed people to live considerably longer, establishing that this version of the world is significantly different than our own. From there, we are taken to Halisham, where young Kathy (Carey Mulligan of An Education) and Ruth (Keira Knightley of all those pirate movies) are close friends, and both are enamored of odd, troubled Tommy (The Social Network’s Andrew Garfield). Young love both blossoms and is destroyed, in that grade school sort of way, as all three come to learn what it means to be a student at Halisham and head into adulthood finally knowing the unavoidable fate they all share.
The terrible destiny that awaits the three schoolmates as they become adults isn’t a secret – millions of readers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s source novel already know – but the film plays better if you don’t. The first half-hour or so, as the youngsters play out an idyllic, congenial English childhood, is all the more unsettling if their ultimate purpose is unknown to the viewer. Everything about their world seems the slightest bit off, and the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies slowly but inevitably pile up. By the time we see Kathy again, into her adulthood and working as a caregiver, we know that only one end awaits her, and it’s not dissimilar to that of Tommy and Ruth.
Never Let Me Go is a movie about choices, about doors being opened that can never be closed again. It’s science fiction in the barest sense of the word. This is not a story of laser guns and spaceships. Its sci-fi is a tinge of jargon and alternate-future sleight of hand that fuels a much more personal, much more alarming drama. This is a movie that has more in common with “Sense & Sensibility” than Star Wars, full of good old-fashioned Proper English Repression (the presence of serial movie Victorian Keira Knightley doesn’t help that impression). Separated lovers gaze longingly at each other across parlors, forever denied by the rules of station and propriety – it’s Michael Bay’s The Island as written by Jane Austen.
This film takes its time. Even those receptive to its languid, delicate charms may find themselves restless at the sheer slowness of it. Never Let Me Go meanders through the lives of its three main characters, filtered through Kathy’s raw sensitivity over the course of decades. It’s a fragile kind of movie whose appeal will be wasted on anyone unwilling or unable to invest in the characters’ complicated friendship. Director Mark Romanek has chosen to go a different route than other music-video-to-feature-film directors, denying all flash in favor of sumptuous, lingering shots of his characters and their environment as if their fates make any more sense when the desperation has time to sink in. Never Let Me Go’s slow pace is both what makes it work and what will likely make it unappealing to many.
Rife with relevant subtext – social, sexual, ethical – Never Let Me Go is, like its characters, a misfit: too strange to be a period drama, too sedate to be blockbuster sci-fi. It settles on a compromise: quiet and introspective – some will say boring – but unnerving in its own subdued way. If you choose to visit the kids at Halisham school, be prepared. They’re extraordinary kids in an extraordinary situation with all-too-human ordinary reactions.
Grade: 4 stars (out of 5)
