Never Let Me Go

NEVER LET ME GO is a thoroughly mediocre piece of melodramatic filmmaking. It's got all the ingredients to make for excellent commentary on subjects such as love, the fleeting nature of life, cloning and human organ transactions, and it winds up saying incredibly trite things about ALL of those themes. If that were it and the characters were still interesting and easy to care about, I may have still given it a mild recommendation, but instead, NEVER LET ME GO offers us one of the weakest, most ridiculous love triangles I've ever witnessed on the big screen. As it turns out, only one of our three protagonists is worth caring about, but that's only because of the talent of the actress playing her, not because of the film itself. The fact that the humdrum title is taken from a song that is heard more than once during the film is only one of the initial signs of the cinematic flatness that you'll be exposed to during NEVER LET ME GO's running time.

The film starts at Hailsham boarding school, which is located in a pretty remote location, and it certainly looks like the students here haven't seen much of the world. In fact, we soon discover that the teachers have told stories to the students about the "awful" things that have happened to anyone who has dared cross the gate that guards the school. We get to meet a particular trio of the kids: Kathy (Izzy Meikle-Small), Tommy (Charlie Rowe) and Ruth (Ella Purnell). It quickly becomes evident that Kathy is very interested in Tommy. Despite her being a child, it seems like more than a school crush, as she worries about him more than you'd expect. She notices Tommy speaking to their teacher, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins), and immediately wants to know what he said to her. Ruth, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care much for Tommy, though she's completely aware of Kathy's interest in him.

One day, all of a sudden, much to Kathy's chagrin, it turns out that now Tommy and Ruth are together, even holding hands during recess time. This happens completely out of the blue, with absolutely no development on how or why Ruth made the decision to be with Tommy, and therein lies NEVER LET ME GO's first fault, which continues to snowball into the rest of the film; things happen jarringly, with little development or background to serve as explanation. On a similar line, one random day during class Miss Lucy decides to reveal to the students the reason why they're, um, "special" (but not special in a good way). This moment is horribly awkward; first of all, it's completely divorced from the way something as devastating as this is revealed to a group of children, and secondly, for the AUDIENCE, this is way too much of a blunt, in-your-face revelation. The film would've benefitted from using a more subtle method to let us in on the secret of Hailsham.

We move ahead several years in time, and the now adults Kathy, Tommy and Ruth (now played by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, respectively) are sharing living accommodations with a few other people who are meant to suffer the same fate as them. They are all clones whose bodies will gradually be used for purposes of organ donation, which means they will all likely be dead in their 30s. But there may be some hope... there's the possibility of a deferral, if two of these people prove that "they're in love". It doesn't mean their bodies won't still be used; it just means they may be given more time. Of course, Tommy and Ruth are still together, though we certainly don't understand why. The film continues to do nothing to portray the relationship between these two or their feelings for one another. All we get are random moments in which we hear them having sex, while a pouting Kathy listens in the other room, still pining for Tommy after all these years. There's a ridiculous scene that almost feels like it was taken out of another film: Ruth walks into the room to explain to Kathy that "Tommy doesn't see her that way," and the moment feels terribly soap-operatic, with its awful lines of dialogue, and to make it even worse, it concludes with a kiss that makes absolutely no sense nor does it have any relevance to the advancement of the plot.

As the film's predictably melodramatic tearjerker of a denouement looms, we get contrivances galore. Kathy happens to spot a picture of Ruth on a computer. Ruth has a last-minute realization that Kathy and Tommy should instead be together, and Tommy's transition from one woman to the other is handled as if feelings and romantic bonds were passed from one person to another as easily as you may pass someone the salt at the dinner table. It's ludicrous. The ultimate "revelation" about the deferral is insultingly predictable. What makes NEVER LET ME GO even worse is that most of this takes place with a strident violin-based score that is WAY too imposing. It's like the movie is BEGGING us to cry.

Obviously, when a character dies in a film, audience members are aware that an actual death hasn't happened because, well, it's just a movie... so, why is it that sometimes we're emotionally affected when a movie character dies? Because he/she has been developed fully and we've come to care a lot about him/her. Not so in NEVER LET ME GO. The film does a monumental disservice to both Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley by giving them completely underdeveloped characters. We never get to know much about Ruth; the film seems more interested in accentuating Knightley's hard facial features, which don't look good in the least bit (certainly no comparison to how regal and luminous she was in ATONEMENT). Tommy has his moments, but he never comes to the surface either, and this is particularly irritating in light of the work Garfield did in BOY A and THE SOCIAL NETWORK, because we KNOW that the guy could've done something incredible with this character if he'd been given the chance to.

The film's lone strength, and the reason why I'm actually being generous in giving it a 4/10, is definitely Carey Mulligan's wonderfully natural and realistic performance as Kathy. If this film had exploited its potential to be a truly devastating piece of cinema, Mulligan's performance would've elevated NEVER LET ME GO into greatness. She belongs in a different movie. Because of the film's lameness and emotional hollowness, it's impossible for her bravura work to have the effect it deserved to have on us.

It's not too important for me whether or not a film has a message. If it takes an interesting path in saying what it has to say, and in the end, we're not quite sure WHAT it said, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But if a film does decide to deliver a message, the LEAST it can do for the audience is not insult it with something that's beyond trite. I can tell you without really spoiling anything what NEVER LET ME GO's ultimate message is: "Life is fleeting and sometimes we may wonder whether we lived it to the fullest or not." Do you feel enlightened? I didn't. Of course, it didn't help that the message is delivered through the film's cheesy voiceover. While I haven't read the novel it is based on, I'd bet money that a lot of these voiceovers are straight from the novel's text. They feel out of place and they're overly descriptive, thus taking away from the film's authenticity. This film should've been raw and devastating, not schmaltzy and superficial. NEVER LET ME GO is a total waste of a great idea for a plot and of a stellar cast.

4/10