Never Let Me Go

Here are my notes for this week's film:

Never Let Me Go

UK 2010                      103 minutes

Director:                      Mark Romanek

Starring:                        Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins

Nominations and Awards

• Won Best Actress Award (Carey Mulligan) at the British Independent Film Awards
• Won Best Actor Award (Andrew Garfield) at the Evening Standard British Film Awards
• A further three wins and 20 nominations.

“This is a good movie, from a masterful novel...  What is happening is implied not spelled out.  We are required to observe.  Even the events themselves are amenable to different interpretations.  The characters may not know what they are revealing about themselves.  They certainly don’t know the whole truth of their existence.  We do, because we are free human beings.  It is sometimes not easy to extend such stature to those we value because they support our comfort.”

Roger Ebert

Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) are all pupils at a boarding school who become entangled in a love triangle.  As their relationship develops they gradually learn why they are at the school and what their fate will be.   

The film is based on the 2005 novel by Kazou Ishiguro who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day (memorably filmed by James Ivory with brilliant performances by Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles).  The screenplay for Never Let Me Go was written by Alex Garland, a friend of Ishiguro who had purchased the film rights before the novel was published.  Garland is an established novelist in his own right (his novels include The Beach and The Tesseract) as well as a screenwriter whose work includes the scripts for 28 Days Later (2002) and Sunshine (2007) both directed by Danny Boyle, who had previously directed a film based on The Beach (2000).

Carey Mulligan was cast in the key role of Kathy on the advice of one of the producers who had just seen her performance in An Education (2009) and Keira Knightley agreed to join the cast after a request from Carey Mulligan (they had both appeared in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice where Knightley played Elizabeth Bennet and Mulligan, in her first film role, played Kitty Bennet. 

Mark Romanek began his career as a director of music videos where he worked with musicians of the calibre of k d lang, David Bowie, Madonna, Michel Jackson and Johnny Cash.  He made his name with the psychological thriller One Hour Photo (2002) for which he also wrote the screenplay, and Never Let Me Go appeared in many critics’ lists of the best films of 2010. 

Here's the trailer: