M's Musings on NEVER LET ME GO

Never Let Me Go.  Dir. Mark Romanek.  Screenplay by Alex Garland.  Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishigiro.  Ft. Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley.  Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010.

Never Let Me Go was pretty much the only book I read for pleasure in the entire 2009-10 school year.  I read it in November during a very difficult and emotional time in my life.  I knew it was going to have a large impact on me, and I was looking to gain some much needed perspective to help get me out of a bit of a funk.  Contemporary dystopic fiction is my very favourite genre, particularly when it is written by such a fine author.  Kazuo Ishigiro is just awesome, and I looked forward to a few hours alone with this book for at least two years before I finally let myself read it.

I loved the slow-paced journey the story took me on.  So many pages of knowing and not knowing the fate of this story.  So much waiting for it to get better for the characters.  So many frustrated expectations, dashed dreams and misguided hopes.  Even more slowly knowing, but also coming to grips with the idea that I wasn't going to get the release I deserved in the form of a happy ending.  I experienced real catharsis after reading this book.  I like dealing with the possibility that you can't escape your fate, and that sometimes there is no going back and saving the past through redemption in the present.

This book made me ache.  I half-hated Kathy from the first page.  She was never going to be the plucky, independent heroine.  She was going to passively let her love fade away from her.  She was going to hold onto objects and stories for years after they ended, nostalgically re-living a childhood past without real happiness.  Everything just hurt.  It was based on false information.  It was based in deception and hope that wasn't grounded in reality.

How could they possibly capture all this emotion in a film adaptation, particularly one with a pretty small movie budget?

When I saw that Alex Garland, another excellent author, wrote the screenplay for this movie, my overall hopes were very high.  As I sat down in the Oxford in Halifax after a wonderful meal with the love of my life and best friend T, I knew that no matter what this movie threw at me, I was going to have an excellent cinematic experience.

The film really capture the pacing of the book, which, is agonizingly slow.  As the various layers are slowly revealed, you constantly are going through a process of reinterpreting the past action in light of the new information.  By the time you discover that the characters are clones, that the gallery was to prove the children had souls, that Kathy was looking for her Original in the porn magazines, and that Kathy was going to start her first treatment... it is always too late.  These moments constantly frustrate the reader, demanding that we too take on this perspective of grasping at straws and re-writing history in order to deal with all the various knowledge we gain as we go through a process of maturation and growth.

By the time Kathy gets to start her relationship with Tommy, all the passion and emotion from their childhoods is long gone.  The sex she has waited so long for is difficult, and often ends in a more domestic cuddling.  The love they need to prove is jaded by the years of separation, and the emotional and physical loss of their bodies.  The idea that parts of their bodies are physically taken from them to keep other people healthy is fascinating.  The fact that morality becomes a non-issue when mortality is on the line make it even more fascinating.  When you look deep into the recesses of society and see the darkness you fear... it is a very powerful literary moment.

Keira Knightly was a great choice for Ruth, though her big name kind of took away from the lead actors.  Interestingly, I would argue that this was also a good choice, because it makes it harder to connect with Kathy.  I thought that Ruth's death scene, and her confession at the boat, were both bang-on.  I was really, really happy with how her character came together.

My only complaint was that I felt the ending wasn't hard hitting enough.  When Ruth is laid open on the surgeon table in that long, slow scene, the detachment with which the doctors pillage her body and then leave her splayed open and dead was really moving.  Watching Tommy's last moments of life was positive, but without that connection to the reality of the death, it really didn't hit the same way.

The fact that Kathy is about to start her first treatment is supposed to shake you to your core.  You are supposed to be so caught up in her own reliving of the past that you also are looking for Tommy over the hill.  I feel like those last scenes went through the motions of the text, but they just weren't able to bring me back to the emotional space of the book.  I think its just because the attachment isn't the same in a two hour movie.  You just don't invest as much into the film as you do in a book.

I am interested to see what T says about this one, and what the critical feedback looks like.  I am not sure if I would have had the same experience if I couldn't map my experience of the book onto the film.

I am really glad I got to see this film.