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.

The Social Network

The Social Network probably had the most buzz of any movie coming out in 2010. It generated huge interest because, well, most of us, myself included, are part of the 500 million users of Facebook. And, of course, this review will be posted on Facebook when it is finished. But beyond that, while The Social Network is clearly a biopic of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook (more on that later), it is clearly a fictionalized biography. And when you are watching the film, it is fun to try and guess what is true and what isn't. As is made clear (murky?) in the many lawsuits that started to fly around once Facebook (originally The Facebook) became a phenomenon, it wasn't just the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). First there are the Winklevoss twins, who hired Zuckerberg to write the code for their social networking site, and also Zuckerberg's best friend and partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). And then there is Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the inventor of Napster who woos Zuckerberg away to California.

Although some (much?) of The Social Network has been fictionalized, it's a fun movie to watch. This film is all about betrayal. And, of course, the fact that the Winklevoss twins won their law suit and got $65 million, and Saverin (as portrayed by Garfield, pictured at right) won his suit and is now a billionaire, might give you an idea of who screwed whom. The role of Sean Parker (as portrayed by Timberlake, pictured below) who was instrumental in convincing Zuckerberg to screw his friends over, was an eye opener for me. 

The Social Network was written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) so my expectations were high going in. And I'm happy to say that the movie lives up to its hype. Somehow, Sorkin and Fincher have made a story about geeky guys sitting at computers 24/7 into an intense spy thriller. The Social Network is a lot like The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's book and movie about the Mercury astronauts. It is a meta-history, mixing real and fictional events into something that none the less feels right. 

It's very fun guessing what is real and what is fiction while you are watching The Social Network. Jesse Eisenberg was born to play Zuckerberg and he projects an amazing arrogant, geeky nastiness. Andrew Garfield, who I really haven't seen before, but now have seen twice in a month (He's also in Never Let Me Go), is a revelation. He's wonderful as the loyal friend of Zuckerberg who gets screwed over and fired, but then sues and wins.

Zuckerberg and his friends mostly stayed out of the fray as The Social Network was opening, but they were very serious about stating that Zuckerberg has had a girlfriend all along. My favorite scene in the movie is aright at the beginning and sets the tone for the whole movie. It shows Zuckerberg's girlfriend (Rooney Mara) dumping him except that he doesn't know that he is being dumped. It is a great scene written by the wonderful Aaron Sorkin, where there are about five conversations going on at once. When Zuckerberg's girlfriend leaves, she says, "You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."