Hailsham. It sounds like the setting of a novel by a Brontë sister, and as the first scenes of idyllic boarding-school life unfold that doesn’t seem so far off the mark.
But the film, based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s “best novel of the decade” (according to the movie poster, a seeming misrepresentation of the book’s inclusion among Time magazine’s 100 English-language picks from 1923 to the present), has something else in mind for its occupants, something more in line with the science fiction of Michael Bay’s The Island – though thankfully lacking in gratuitous car chases.
Never Let Me Go 
Directed by Mark Romanek. |
Before Hailsham, before the wistful narration by Kathy (Carey Mulligan), now a “carer,” begins to describe her upbringing there, a perfunctory title card explains that human life expectancy reached an average of 100 years by 1967 after the “medical breakthroughs” in 1952.
But then we are back at Hailsham, where Kathy is a pre-teen and the students know only that they are “special” and that remaining healthy – inside and out – is of paramount importance, because that’s what the headmistress (played by the inimitable Charlotte Rampling) tells them.
Their precise role, like the nature of this alternate-history world that gave rise to such a role in the first place, is initially left unclear, subject to a series of subtle, slow-burn revelations that carry the film through its emotional trajectory.
Kathy fancies her classmate Tommy (played as an adult by Andrew Garfield), the endearing oddball and loner, but after a brief rapport between them he is stolen away by Kathy’s supposed best friend, Ruth (who will grow up into Keira Knightley).
This triangle is the heart of the film, which wants us to understand that jilted love is something we humans effect, and overshadowed as we are by the awesome vagaries of fate, the best we can usually do is live and let live.
For a time, the spurned Kathy loses herself in fictional singer Judy Bridgewater’s “Never Let Me Go,” much the same way Patsy Cline and Hello Dolly! served the narratives of C.R.A.Z.Y. and WALL-E, respectively, but director Mark Romanek (whose only other feature film credit since 1985 is One Hour Photo) knows better than to emphasize the song to the point where it becomes a recurrent theme for the film, sparing it from that nettlesome tinge of derivation and redundancy that crops up so frequently in lazier movies than this.
However, as the story builds patiently to its climax, there are a few too many hows, whys, and wherefores left unanswered in the interim; the characters never seem to ask (or to have asked) the obvious questions, which contributes to a sense that nothing ever happens between the scenes we watch unfold before our eyes, as if the characters exist only in the isolated vignettes we are privy to.
The characters, as characters, are nicely delineated for narrative purposes, but their lives, those elements that stack up to something more than a character arc, are not sufficiently defined.
That’s a pity, because the players are manifestly capable of that something more. When it comes time for a late second-act confession, Knightley gives us an upwelling of emotion and regret that puts the barely present reactions of her co-stars to shame – but they redeem themselves toward the end as the film marches toward its ultimate commentary on the human condition.
And this is after an incredible ensemble of earnest child-actor performances brimming with the sort of subtlety and emotional heft usually reserved for scenes after the transition to adulthood, with the different periods united and accented by Rachel Portman’s beautiful score.
The climax itself is heavy-handed, predictable as a telegraphed punch, but poignant nonetheless, though robbed of some of its closing fulfilment by a final voiceover which flatly states that the story is a microcosm of human life – it seems unnecessary, bordering on insulting, for this to be made so unpoetically explicit after what has come before.
All the same, Never Let Me Go packs a punch, right in the heart.