Never Let Me Go

It's amazing how someone can come out of nowhere and become the "it" girl. Last year, Carey Mulligan was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for An Education, and this year she appears in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Never Let Me Go. One minute, she was nowhere and the next, she is everywhere. Same for Andrew Garfield who also stars in Never Let Me Go and in The Social Network. Garfield and Mulligan along with Keira Knightly are young adults who have grown up in what seems at first to be a normal private school except for the fact that the students are afraid to go outside the school grounds and never go home for holidays. As we soon learn, they are being raised for only one purpose to be organ donors to the person they have been cloned from.

Never Let Me Go begins when the main characters are young children and they are only dimly aware of the future ahead of them. One teacher (Sally Hawkins) tries to tell the students what is really going on but she gets sacked by the imperial headmistress (Charlotte Rampling). But even Rampling is ambivalent toward these cloned children.  As she says later, "We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all."  Later as young adults, they know what is happening, but are very fatalistic about it. There are no attempts to escape their fate like in The Island where Ewen McGregor runs away when he finds that he has a similar fate awaiting him. In Never Let Me Go, it is rumored that the only possible means of escape is to fall in love in which case their sentences are stayed for a few years. But this proves to be a false hope and so we have to watch as first Knightley's character and then Garfield's start to undergo the knife and begin to die.

Never Let Me Go is based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro who also wrote The Remains of the Day and The White Countess. The director, Mark Romanek, yet another music video director, has directed only one feature film previously, One Hour Photo, and that was 8 years ago. But that movie was probably good preparation for Never Let Me Go which has little or no action and is all about the internal emotions of the three main characters as they come to terms with their "nasty, brutish and short" lives.  The cast is very good, particularly Mulligan, who has shown in her other roles a gift for understating her character. Garfield also seems well matched to this role. And Knightly, in a rare supporting role, is good as the most unhappy of the trio. Never Let Me Go is not a happy film but it is very well done.  This film like so many others is about the characters being in death spiral that cannot be stopped. And there are lots of scenes of long longing looks between the doomed students. But Never Let Me Go is a very beautiful film despite its quiet desperation. It will be getting a few Oscar nominations I think.