Letting go is never easy
dir: Mark Romanek
2010
What a strange, sad film. Watching Never Let Me Go was a profoundly melancholy experience for me, despite the fact that not much overtly happens, and none of my tears flowed in programmed Pavlovian response to deftly deployed violins or postcard photography.
After all, I’m not some flouncy squats-to-piss girl’s blouse. Even if the ending of Toy Story 3 made me weep like a little girl with a skinned knee. No, no sooky la-la, I.
At its heart it’s a simple love story involving three people, but its setup is anything but simple. The flick, based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, posits an alternate history timeline where certain medical breakthroughs in our history changed the course of humanity.
And not for the better, as far as the protagonists are concerned. The flick’s timeline covers three distinct time periods, being the 1970s, the 80s and the 90s. Though the setting and the environs don’t really change with the passage of time, our protagonists grow up, and change, and realise just how awful their predicament is.
When they’re just kids, at a very exclusive school called Hailsham, we see pretty quickly that this isn’t a Hogwarts International School of Magical Whimsy and Delight. Mostly, we know this because everything’s so drab, drab in that way that Britain does so well. It’s a drabness, a leeching of colour and life that’s meant to recall an even earlier time of rationing and fearing the air raid sirens and clustering in bomb shelters and singing mocking songs about the Germans.
Hailsham is lorded over by an imposing schoolmistress played by Charlotte Rampling, who weightily intones to the children how important it is for them to stay healthy at all times, for theirs is a sacred and charmed life meant for greater service to humanity. Not for them the callow joys of smoking or fucking, no.
At least that’s what it looks like to me. Three children, out of a large group of healthy, bright children, form a strange bond. Kathy (played as an adult by the always excellent Carrie Mulligan), Ruth (the always bony and frightening Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield). Tommy is artistic, incompetent at sports and subject to screaming rages. Kathy ignores the mockery of the other children, and seeks to lighten his burdens by caring about him. Ruth, being a total bitch, sees Kathy’s affections, and driven by jealousy, interposes herself between the two once it is made apparent that Tommy loves Kathy as well.
In the second timeframe, the children, having grown up in total isolation, are moved to The Cottages, where they are meant to simply wait, wait, wait until they are summoned to the next phase of their lives. There they meet other children who grew up in other places like Hailsham, and though they be moderately more acclimatised to the outside world, they still look and act like the children of gypsies.
Through this, Ruth constantly extends her smoky gaze towards Kathy, admiring the misery she’s imposed upon her by stealing her one true love, loudly having sex with Tommy to extend her hold over him like a branding, and to force Kathy to realise how much she’s lost in this battle.
Kathy is distraught, and so very sad, but the source of her sadness is more profound than just jealousy. The title of the movie comes from a fictional song sung in the style of a torch singer in the Dusty Springfield mold, from a tape given to her by Tommy. This bond goes deeper than they realise, though the flick never really clarifies why Tommy is so subservient to the needs of Ruth and the needs of the plot, such as it is.
An ancient audio tape is the source of the song, which Tommy bought for Kathy, in a scene so wry and so gutting, where the children of Hailsham spend plastic tokens they think are money, which they earn with their obedience, purchasing trash that would be rejected by the Salvos if it was slotted into their donation bins. The children cluster excitedly around a yob as he carries in some of these boxes of trash, thrilled to bits and yelling “Would you say it’s a bumper crop?” to which the delivery man, knowing how worthless the stuff is, sarcastically intones, “Yeah, a bumper crop.”
Orphans always have it the worst. When Ruth spies Kathy leafing through a porno magazine, she cattily and cruelly mocks Kathy for her lack of love and sex life, misunderstanding completely what Kathy is doing, which we, too, as the audience, misunderstand until it is brought up later in the film. The explanation is quite surprising for such a flick, though it’s part and parcel with the complexity the story tries to wring out of simple materials. Ruth’s other mannerisms and behaviours and language change with exposure to the other people in the cottages, as she strives to blend chameleon-like, always projecting emotions and feelings she doesn’t possess.
They go on a road trip of sorts, instigated by a fleeting glimpse of someone who is referred to as an Original, which these kids are curious about and feel the need to pursue. Original posits the concept of ‘origins’, and so it makes sense that orphans, which is what these kids are essentially, would be obsessed with their origins. It doesn’t turn out well, but that’s what we’ve come to expect.
In this strange world, with these strange lives that these kids lead, some of them can get the one form of employment open to them, and be designated as Carers. Kathy, possessing a certain amenity for caring, gets to look after certain people who are in need. She accomplishes this task with skill and empathy, but none of it covers up her sense of loss, the gaping wound lifelong in her heart.
The last phase of the film, transpiring as it does in the 1990s, covers the righting of wrongs, apologies for beastly behaviour, and an attempt, when it is too late, to delay the inevitable. In this world, this strange cowardly old world, there is no reprieve, and no deferral. Kathy and Tommy come to believe an old rumour, which somehow gets corroborated by Ruth, that there could be a way to change their fate. And they pursue it with the naivety and hopefulness of children, which is what they still are, even as adults.
All I’ll say about that is this: at the beginning of the film, Tommy screams as he is overtaken by a pure rage, but he is a child, venting his frustration at the cruel world. When the scene is replicated towards the end of the flick, when the adult Tommy does it for the similar reasons, but with far more justification, it’s devastating.
There is something really fundamental to the story that I’ve elected to allude to but leave out from my review. It’s basic and all-encompassing, but I really wanted to see if it was possible to review the flick without spoiling it. I knew going in what this central conceit was, but I think it’s important for people not to come to this flick expecting something erroneous based on that knowledge.
Yes, you could just as easily label this a science fiction flick, but it’s a flick where technology is entirely absent (insofar as it relates to the premise, except for some moderately medium-tech wristbands), and you wouldn’t have any clue from watching random scenes of the flick. It’s a good decision, though some viewers might find it confusing. This world that they live in, most of which we never get to see, is a world every bit as totalitarian and cruel as the one created in Ninety Eighty-Four, but we never see the apparatus of state that would be required to maintain this perverse status quo. That’s a good thing, too, because if it had been obvious, then that’s what the flick would have been about, instead of the relationship between the three kids.
Carey Mulligan is good because she’s good at looking sad and self-contained, both of which the flick depends on. She speaks to us minimally in voiceover, which thankfully isn’t overused, but hers is a sadness so strong that it doubles as our own as well. She’s the heart and soul of the flick, even as Tommy is its rage and Ruth is its needy capacity for cruelty. Andrew Garfield, already respected for his work as Eduardo Savarin in The Social Network, as the guy foolish enough to think that his friend Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going to fuck him over, is already tipped to become a household name, what with his pulling on of the red and blue Spider-Man tights in the upcoming flick, but he is a good actor. He does a lot with very little here, since most of the flick, if you wanted to be unfair about it, is comprised of the various characters looking across fields, across the ocean or out of windows contemplating a future that will not be kind.
I can’t really bring myself to say anything positive about Knightley, but I guess she was appropriate for the part. “Eat something” is all I can generally think of whenever I see her, no matter how good or bad she is in anything.
I derived an immense amount of enjoyment from watching this flick, but it would be very hard to explain why. I know that I’ve essentially admitted that this review is a failure, but that doesn’t preclude trying. It’s sad, it’s subtle, it’s ineffable, it’s emotional in all the right places, and cold in ways that only accentuate the quality of the story. I’m aware that this adaptation was mostly panned, critically, and audiences stayed away in droves, but I ‘enjoyed’ it immensely.
I just wish it hadn’t left this aching feeling where my heart used to be
8 times the search for that which makes us complete doesn’t always work out the way we’d wish out of 10
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“You have to know who you are, and what you are. It's the only way to lead decent lives.” – Never Let Me Go
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