NEVER LET ME GO Post-Release

Is this a pre or post release thread?

I'm terrified of this movie because I don't want Romanek to screw it up. One Hour Photo was an okay thriller, and he's got a pretty good eye, but I could easily see him overplaying his hand with the book's beautifully subtle material. The man's only made a couple feature films, after all. I'm not knocking him as a "music video" director, I just don't know what to think about him yet. Also, most of the projects he touches seem to fall apart before he even has anything to do with them, or he quits (The Wolfman).

I'll see it, but my expectations are guarded.

Saw this the other day. Above average. Quiet, understated, somber, beautifully shot, great performances by Mulligan (is there anyone else who can shed a tear better?) and especially Garfield, but felt a bit rushed (it clocks in just around 100 minutes).

The book took its time, the environments felt lived in, and gradually cued the readers in gradually to the impending doom of its characters, and though the film carries the same stately, atmospheric dread as the novel, a lot of the moments (including the love triangle) couldn't carry enough weight because the film kept rushing ahead when it should have slowed down. If ever a film needed an extra 20 minutes added to its length, it's this one. This world these three live in is endlessly fascinating and a character in and of itself, I just wish this was translated to film better.

All is not lost, though. There are some really amazing moments here that make the film well worth the time. *SPOILER* Garfield's rage filled outburst outside of the car with Mulligan could have been a laughable moment, but he fills this scene with such passion that the audience aches right along with him. *SPOILER*

Like I said, the film carries the same elegiac tone as the book, nothing is overplayed. It just could have been longer.

My review:

http://chud.com/articles/articles/25...-GO/Page1.html

Wow, Renn, sounds like Romanek and his cast knocked this one out of the park. Can't wait to see it for myself.

So I've got a dilemma and I'd like to ask those who have both read the book and seen the film a question.

I've been looking forward to this movie for a little while, but I just now realized that in one of my lit classes we've been assigned this book to read towards the end of the semester. Thanks to the rest of my reading schedule I won't be able to give the book a go until then.

Now, should I just go ahead and see the film in theaters, or should I wait, read the book first, and then catch it later.

Really, really conflicted on this one.

As always, the book is better than the film. But I would see the film first, because it'll make the book that much better when you read it. Both are good in their own way, but the movie is quick and skirts a TON of nuance and moments that the book has.

Having not read the book and essentially going in blind, I was very, very, very impressed with this film. Elegant is a word, near transcendent. Just so...beautiful and lovely and terrifying all at the same time. The acting, the camerawork, the music, everything worked quite well with me. The script needed just a little more polish, a bit more material to let it all breathe; the love triangle was rushed and when Mulligan gave a voiceover, especially during the middle, I wanted to smack Romanek for telling us, rather than showing us.

But damn...damn if this movie isn't depressing and moving. Such a wonderful film. I know it's in English, but I don't want them to remake it ever. They'd turn it into some sort of escape your fate adventure thrill ride, when the submission to their fates is what lends the film gravity.

Agree with Renn that the biggest problem is that there aren't enough good times to counterbalance the omnipresent sense of resignation and depression. Maybe a joke (seriously, I don't think there was a single laugh line in the entire script), or another scene or two with Ruth being actually friendly toward her friends. That and the last, on-the-nose line about how similar the donor lives were from normal folk (which wasn't in the book, btw) were about the only gripes I had.

Overall, though, it was gorgeously shot and impeccably acted. I was thinking that Tommy's outburst by the car would come off as laughable on screen, but Garfield sold the shit out of it. That's our new Spiderman, eh? Not bad.

I find it kind of depressing that the film has seemingly dissapeared or maybe its just me.

The book is better and the last section I think is a bit rushed (although that final scene is devastating) but overall I thought it was a great extremely well acted film.

I was hoping Mark Romaneck would have some better luck with the movie.

FWIW, it's still at the art houses around here, and I had assumed it was eventually going wider. Guess maybe not?

It's finally opening up here in Miami tomorrow night, I'll be checking it out.

Kind of the same issue I had with the movie. It's a straight march to Miseryville for the most part, albeit a beautiful acted and directed one. I actually was most impressed by Knightley, especially during that beach scene. She was damn good. The brutally cold scene where she expires on the operating table to absolutely NO reaction from the surgeons was the film's nastiest gutpunch for me.

For those who read the book, is there any more detail or follow up with Miss Lucy? Seemed odd that the film just forgets her existence after about 30 minutes.

Miss Lucy disappears after the first section of the book as well. It's just as narrowly focused on the core trio as the film.

You mean, like this?

Saw this last night. Completely agreed on the death march aspect of the whole film, and the lack of counterbalance. The film sets up early how incredibly unnatural the real world is for these characters, and it sorta never wavers from that, which hurts the film, as does the Clarissa Explains It All ending monologue.

But when the film is on point, said deathmarch is effective as hell. The cold claiming of Ruth's organs, and the smile Tommy gives on the operating table are probably the saddest scenes I've witnessed all year.

As for the Miss Lucy thing: I don't think we need more with her. She's there to set the limits for our characters, and for us really, not much else. She does her job in that she sets the tone for the rest of the film.

It's good, but endlessly cold, without really spending the time to lay into why the audience should care. And yet, so much of the story is just naturally tragic that Romanek probably though levity would make it overkill.

Isn't the lack of counterbalance the point? It's not like the film infers they live joyless lives. It shows you the fringes of the happy moments, like the kids celebrating when the junk boxes come in (which is sort of bittersweet, since the audience knows it's junk), or the fun they're having before Mulligan/Garfield/Knightley reveal to the other couple that they haven't heard anything about the deferrals, their trip to the beach and Garfield's joy at seeing the boat, or the way Mulligan bonds with some of the donors. And the moment where Kathy listens to the tape for the first time is pure bliss, although again, bittersweet for the audience. But these people don't have happy lives. It is a death march. Should such a thing be lightened for the benefit of the people watching?

I thought it was excellent.

A few more pinches of real happiness wouldn't actually "lighten" it for the audience, imo. It would make the tragedy of completion* hit that much harder if the mood of the film wasn't so pervasively somber. There's a coldness to the proceedings that is a bit distancing emotionally.

*Such a wonderfully evocative euphemism for death, by the way.

I dunno, I think it's tragic as is because you see what little scope their life has. They walk such a narrow path. That's at the heart of the tragedy.

Just came back from this, and goodness what a melancholy film. The more I see of Garfield the more I like him. Mulligan, I mean wow, she was amazing I thought. Everytime I held out a little hope that Tommy and Kathy might escape their fate, I was crushed. I kept thinking, "just run away!", but I guess they were too programmed. So glad I went to see this.

Just returned from seeing Never Let Me Go.  I went in about as cold as you could.  All I knew about the film was that it showed up on the Top 15 lists all over CHUD.  I checked out right after The Village moment and even more so after The Island explanation.  If I hadn't been there with someone else I would have gotten up and walked out.  I didn't care at all for the euphemisms and was only really impressed with the first tape scene and the emotional outburst outside the car.

 

Wow, I don't think I have ever had a film miss for me so much.

Beautiful movie.

The ending or the deaths didn't hit me as hard. I didn't really connect to any of the characters, but i was fascinated by the world created and the themes the movie explored.

 

Romanek is the real deal. I hope he doesn't wait 8 years for the next one.

If you liked the movie, check out the absolutely awesome Creative Screenwriting podcast with Kazuo Ishiguro and Alex Garland.  Ishiguro makes the case for why the story is actually optimistic (really!), Garland takes very frankly about the what went wrong with Sunshine (sorry, RCA, even the writer thinks the ending is weak), and Mr. Beaks himself guest-hosts (I know some chewers aren't a fan of the regular dude).

 

It's about halfway down the page.

 

http://creativescreenwritingmagazine.blogspot.com/

I listened to that podcast over the weekend.  Really good stuff.  I love the fact that what went wrong with the ending of Sunshine is... "we didn't know what we were doing."

 

EDIT:  I wish Beaks always moderated these things.  I hate hate hate Goldsmith's voice.

Boooooooooring.

 

This film makes Merchant Ivory productions seem like Michael Bay productions.  A fine film in every aspect except in the entertainment department - not much actually happens other than lips flapping. 

This film is the cinematic equivalent of a Voight-Kampff test. It's a story about empathy & it's narrative is driven by it. The movie only works if the audience is emotionally involved with the characters. If they aren't then, yeah, it'll come off as sterile & lifeless.

 

Me? I was captivated (and this comes from someone who assumed that the film was gonna be 2 hours of pretty English people being sad in a field). The film is patently fantastic & I've been thinking about it all week.

 

Merchant/Ivory would've been damn proud to have this in their staple.

2 hours of pretty English people being sad in a field isn't that far off the mark, to be fair.

 

Still, this one has stuck with me and I think I actually like it better now than when I walked out of the theater.  And part of that is how deliberately uncinematic it all is.  The tragedy is quiet and stark, which gives the premise a disconcerting believability.  Can't wait to see what the director does next.  Was he really just a music video guy before this?

 

In a normal year, I'd say Mulligan made a strong case for an Actress statue, but in this field I can't justify putting her ahead of Portman or Jennifer Lawrence.  Still, not having seen An Education, this was a real eye-opener for me.

Have you seen One Hour Photo?

Nope. 

For all the efforts at being realistic, it was strange they never attempted to or even talked about escaping.  Its like they were trying too hard at not being obvious or realistic or something. 

 

I think the film's argument is that, if you were raised in this sort of oppression, you wouldn't once question it. Why escape when you don't exactly understand what you're escaping to? The oppressed don't ever consider what the other side consists of. You think someone born and raised into slavery would dream all day about what it was like to be free? If that's all they know, doubtful. For the movie to work, you really have to assume Havisham just beat the LIFE out of these kids before they had a chance to dream bigger.

 

 

Wrong. Havisham was a strict school but it wasn't oppressively so. Quite the opposite in fact. The headmistress knew these kids had no future so, being sympathetic to them, she would've been careful never to even suggest that that wasn't the case. As young children, the idea of worldly boundaries isn't "beaten" into them, it's "suggested"&  reinforced by a handful of scary lies & stories, As they grow up, they're simply not exposed to media or anything that would give them the idea that they have a long, happy life full of worldly possibilities ahead of them.

 

Also, the closest thing to a parent the kids have is their "original". They're aware of that fact & their inevitable sacrifice is the only sense of parental lineage they have.

This, I believe, is tied directly to an inherent need to know & ultimately be accepted by their "original". To escape would be an absolute rejection of their "parentage", as it were.

As per the escape, if the metaphor is that we all die, how do you escape death?.

That's precisely the point.  In that interview I linked to above, Ishiguro talks about how in real life, people are on the whole very accepting of the fates that are dealt to them, citing slavery and the Holocaust as examples of atrocities that were not stopped by an uprising of the oppressed people.

 

Besides that, the whole deferment thing is an attempt to escape,  just on a smaller and quieter scale than we're accustomed to seeing in such films.

There are two defining moments in the film for me, two little bits which completely solidify the tone of the piece. The first happens about forty minutes into the film when Miss Lucy attempts to reveal to the children of the Hailsham Boarding School what their real purpose is. After this revelation the children stare at her blanky, completely unaffected by this revelation. It’s not that they’re stupid and don’t understand, they just don’t question their ultimate fate. Their disposable purpose is so ingrained in their psyche that they accept their fate completely. 

The other moment is when one of these disposable people lies on an operating table, she flatlines and the surgeons calmly remove the organ they need and then leave her there. It’s a cold and brutal scene and it works spectacularly because Mark Romanek lets us care about and emphasis with these disposable people. It’s almost a Voight-Kampff test in that it’s a film predicated on your emotional attachment to the main characters, if you don’t care then it’s going to drag, if you do care it’s a beautiful, if morose, story about faith, forgiveness and destiny.

The thing that I love about the Miss Lucy thing is that the end turns it into an antagonistic action by Miss Lucy.  Miss Lucy doesn't tell the children of Hailsham that they're going to grow up to have their organs harvested because she feels bad for them, exactly.  She tells them because she doesn't believe that they should be treated like regular human children.  The whole reason Hailsham students are thought to be special, and the basis for the deferrals myth is because the Headmistress does believe that they're regular human children.  Or at least, that they might be.

Yeah, I kind of love that who we initially perceive as being a 'good' character actually views the children as being inhuman whilst the character we perceive as being 'evil', The Madame, actually achingly cares for them. I love that moment where the Madame visits and she's just shrinks away from the kids, because at first we think it's because she thinks they're repugnant, but I actually think she's desperate not to humanise them to much. She can't bear to think of them as people. 

I thought it was a beautiful film, very moving. Keira's acting/character seemed overshadowed by the other two lead's brilliant performances, but maybe her shallowness was the point. Really loved Garfield's artwork, hoping it will show up on the DVD/BD in a slideshow gallery. Pity the Oscars/Globes ignored this, but it was always going to be a tough sell: a melancholy period drama with high-concept sci-fi, provoking ethical questions. America said, "No thank you."

What a beautiful film. I'll admit it took me a while to get over the silliness of the conceit (and yes, it really IS silly), but once I did I just got swept away by the characters. Knightley's matter-of-fact confession was particularly well-written and acted - it's exactly the type of sobriety that you'd expect from someone whose death is impending.

 

Love that Romanek didn't have a problem suppressing his cinematic ticks and letting the actors carry the thing.

It's that central wonky premise that I find the elephant in the room. It's all very well for the author to attempt to winkle out of this preposterous conceit by comparing his characters fates with the utter resignation of holocaust victims and such, yet, he misses the rather jarring fact that those people were forced into those fates, whereas never do we see any forcible coercion of the young adults in Never Let Me Go. Had the victims of the holocaust had an open door when they knew their fate, they undoubtedly would have taken it. In Never Let Me Go the characters quite literally have that open door available to them whilst knowing their fate yet never once consider going through it.

 

I certainly don't accept that they were brought up to accept their purpose either, not as presented in the movie and I suspect the book too. Their growing up seemed not entirely dissimilar to any other child going to boarding school at a young age; they had interactions with outsiders, freedom to explore ideas and even their initial relative isolation becomes entirely relaxed when in their late teens.

And I'm also expected to suspend belief that there's no mass outcry from the general public about such an issue? Seriously? And those who are against such a practice are relying on 'art works' as their key weapon to prove these people are people too?!?! Absolutely awful stuff, and the whole soul-painting thing is particularly grating and clumsy.

 

So why should I care for these characters when in the world they live no one really cares enough, if at all about themselves or each other to do anything?

That Kathy can watch Tommy, whom she loves dearly,  take his last breath in a needless and preventable death is not a tragedy, but utter fucking apathy.

I was far more depressed that a story so fundamentally obnoxious in it's premise can be lauded with high praise and awards.

 

 

That said, Mulligan and Garfield's performances were worth the view alone, I just think they deserved better.

 

 

Edited by blipper - 4/12/11 at 6:48am

 

Did you miss that the kids have bracelets that they have to swipe to check in and out of their cottages, and that they didn't have any meaningful interactions with outsiders to the point where they were terrified of ordering sandwiches in the real world, and that the art thing was completely ineffectual in reforming anything, and the "normal" school they went to was an experiment that was shut down after they left?

 

 

I'm struggling to find a nice way of saying "you didn't get it" but... I don't have an end to this sentence. I wonder how you feel about and how you interpret what you observe in the wider world, which is filled with mass devotion to systems (read: belief systems) more illogical and apathy more horrifying than anything a movie could ever hope to come up with...

Rented this the other week...what an incredible film! The acting was amazing. I loved the story and the world that the director and actors brought us into. Just beautiful!

 

Well he's not completely wrong. At the very least there would be multitudes of human rights groups, though I guess you could assume they you just don't see them in the film. My problem stems more from the silliness of the conceit itself. Raising people, teaching them properly, allowing them to intermingle with the outside world where people might get to know and sympathise with them and then just killing them... Why not clone body parts, or at the very least keep them away from the outside world? 

 

It works really well for the story, but I was still going "well this is just silly!" for like the first third of the movie.

 

The "soul" bit was also kind of silly, but that might be the point.

The Plausibles strike again.

 

 

Well if by "it" you mean a moving and thoughtful examination of the human condition then it's certainly not to be found in this particular movie. It's a banal reduction that's too concerned with profundity at the expense of plausability. The humans that populate the world of Never Let Me Go have more in common with the innards of a mechanical watch than any people I've ever come across.  It's less a story of those who saw no escape in the holocaust and more a story of how those who could perpetrate such an atrocity could do such a thing, and by this I mean the central characters, their ability to emotionally detach and their complicity in something immoral.


Let's say Kathy and Tommy had been brought up to bear a child, a child which was to be given away at say 3 or 4 years of age for donation purposes. Can you see them willingly give it up without a fight or the thought of escape? Well these two would. Oh sure Tommy would raise his fists to the sky at the botheration of it all, but then he'd simply shrug and hand the child over and smile at Kathy.

And belief systems such as you propose in the 'wider world' around me are hardly apathetic. We may or may not agree on the merits of religion/belief systems but there can be no doubt they do instill motivation and aspiration. World changing events of the past decade are testament to that.

The characters in Never Let Me Go however, truly live their lives with a shrug of the shoulders and no more.  Never is there a compelling reason presented for why everyone acts the way they do in such extraordinary circumstances. From my point of view the story/film is absolutley about apathy and inertia, we're even tipped off early on when the young Kathy let's Ruth take Tommy from her with nary a word.

I know that's not the film makers intent but how should I arrive at anything else when the human charcters in this movie are anything but human?

I'm struggling to find another way of saying this movie is not quite as deep or clever as it thinks it is.. but I cant :-P





 

 

The sandwich incident was the first interaction those particular characters had in that situation - notice how comfortable the other doner characters acting as chaperones were though. Which shows that whatever brainwashing there was, the shyness towards normal people was not an insurmountable problem and would diminish in time, otherwise 'Carers' could not interact with hospital staff. Humans adapt very quickly to new situations. As for the bracelets, well, it's not quite Alcatraz levels of security is it.
 

 

The story is set several decades after the system has been put in place, when any meaningful controversy has quieted.  And since it is in large part about the level of horror people will passively accept as long as it's part of the plan (Ledger's Joker approves!), that seems appropriate. 

 

Also, the kids level of schooling was atypical, part of the last gasp of the opposition to the donor system, and most clones were much more sheltered and presumably mistreated.  I don't remember how explicit the film is on that point and how much I'm bringing over from the book, though.

The characters are surely human, and the film is filled with delicate, beautiful moments that indicate exactly who each of these characters are. Frustration with their non-revolutionary spirit is understandable, but that's the point of the film. It's saying something about indoctrination, apathy, complicity, and even worse- inability to even recognize the horror of the system in the first place. This film isn't about a Holocaust, or a singular event with blatant issues and troops and what have you. It's about the creeping, sliding decay of a civilization's ideals, morality, and understanding of itself (which could ultimately lead to a Holocaust, of course). It's about the systems we let be put into place and become routine. It's about the forest we miss for the trees. There's a reason why these kids are never fighting the system, but rather looking for extensions or ways to get what they innately want within the system. They see no world beyond it- that's much more interesting and frightening from where I sit. Sure, it would have been great and satisfying and easy for Hugo Weaving to show up in a mask and rile everyone up with revolutionary spirit to march against this ludicrous evil system, but that's not what this film is.

 

Perhaps you live in Egypt or Libya currently and don't have the same view of the world I do, but there is a massive amount of apathy infecting it. I can't imagine that's actually under question. All hail the revolutions past and present, but for every one of them, there's been a dozen or a hundred other countries (civilizations, towns, companies, groups, whatever) that sat pretty while frightening changes took place all around them with the quiet strokes of pens, rather than tossed rocks or fired bullets.

 

EDIT: I might be TL:DR'ing this.

How is "you're dead by thirty" any harder a premise to swallow than "radio-active spider-bite"? I don't get that. Also everyone in this thread will probably be dead before they're 90. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO CHANGE THAT?