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Never Let Me Go Trailer

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Film Blog #3 - Never Let Me Go

Film Data

Title: Never Let Me Go Director: Mark Romanek Date of Release: September 3, 2010 Country: United Kingdom Genre: Science Fiction Drama Budget: $15 million Box Office: $111,734 Source: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=neverletmego.htm

Synopsis

The film begins with captions on the screen describing a medical breakthrough that occurred in 1952 that now allows people to live up to 100 years. The captions cut to a surgery table where a young man, Tommy (Andrew Garfield), is being prepared for an operation. Tommy looks toward a viewing window where 28 year-old Kathy H (Carey Mulligan) is watching and narrating the story. Kathy begins reminiscing about her life; Hailsham, the Cottages, and life afterwards.

The first act of the film is in 1968 at Hailsham, the English boarding school Kathy attended. At the school 12 year-old Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small) and her friends Tommy (Charlie Rowe) and Ruth (Ella Purnell) grow up and play games as in any other boarding school. Tommy has anger issues and screams when the other boys pick on him and leave him out of games. When Kathy tries to comfort him he accidentally hits her. However, Kathy forgives him and feelings begin to grow between the two. Tommy gives Kathy a record tape as a present and soon Ruth begins to notice the flowering romance. Soon afterwards Ruth starts a relationship with Tommy and Kathy is hurt. However as the film progresses it becomes clear Hailsham is no ordinary boarding school and the children aren’t normal either. The students wear metal bracelets which they must pass through a scanner as they exit and enter the school doors, every morning pills and milk are laid out for them to take, and they are encouraged to create art which will be chosen for “The Gallery” owned by a woman only known as Madame. A new teacher, or “guardian,” begins working at the school. Ms. Lucy asks the children why they aren’t allowed to go outside of the fence in the grounds and the children tell her stories they’ve heard of kids who went outside and died. Ms. Lucy is confused by these stories and seems wary about what exactly is happening in the school. One day she tells the students of their actual roles in life. Hailsham students will eventually donate their vital organs once they are young adults. Before they are even middle-aged the students will have donated about three of their organs and they will “complete.” Shortly after Ms. Lucy is fired.

The second act of the film take place once the students leave Hailsham at 18 years-old. Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Ruth (Keira Knightley) now join other students who graduated from similar boarding schools at The Cottages. At The Cottages the kids are given more independence and can even go into neighboring towns. Ruth and Tommy are still and become sexually active. Ruth identifies herself with an older student named Chrissie (Andrea Riseborough) and her boyfriend Rodney (Domhnall Gleeson). Kathy is mostly left on her own, but Tommy continues to seek her out. One night Kathy finds porno magazines and begins to flip through them in a barn. Tommy walks in and questions what she’s doing. Kathy becomes frustrated because of his questions and walks out telling him to give them to Ruth. The following day Ruth tells Kathy that Rodney and Chrissie had gone into a neighboring town and saw a woman who might be Ruth’s “possible.” Rodney, Chrissie, Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy go into the town to look for the woman. When the five of them have lunch Rodney and Chrissie ask the three youths about the rumors of “deferrals.” According to Rodney and Chrissie Hailsham students who were couples truly in love could apply to someone about getting a deferral and being able to live a couple of years before their first donation. However none of the three friends know what they are talking about. The five of them leave to look for Ruth’s possible and find that the woman looks nothing like Ruth. Ruth is angered and tells Kathy that they were modeled after social rejects; prostitutes, junkies, and drunks. It now becomes clear that the children from these boarding schools are actually clones. The day after they return to the Cottages Kathy and Tommy take a walk in the woods and Tommy tells Kathy about his theory of the deferrals. Tommy believes The Gallery was set up so the people at Hailsham could look inside the student’s souls and determine whether the couples who apply for deferrals are actually in love or not. Kathy asks him if he’s planning to apply with Ruth but he tells her it wouldn’t work, and he reminds Kathy that while she got many artworks into the Gallery his work was never chosen. Kathy begins to cry and walks away. That night Kathy hears Ruth and Tommy have loud sex and she listens to the tape Tommy gave her years ago. Ruth enters her room afterwards and tells her that Tommy will never love Kathy the way she wants him to. The next day Kathy applies to be a “carer;” those clones who have a temporary reprieve from their donations to do the job of comforting and supporting donors. Shortly after Kathy leaves to do her training Ruth and Tommy split up.

The third and final act of the film takes place ten years later when Kathy is working as a carer. Kathy goes to the hospital where the current patient she cares for completes after a donation. In the same hospital Kathy runs into Ruth who she hasn’t seen since she left the cottages. Ruth has done two donations and is very weak and frail. Ruth tells Kathy that she’s been keeping tabs on her and Tommy ever since they left the Cottages. She asks Kathy if they could go on a trip to an abandoned boat left at sea, and asks her if they can pick up Tommy on the way. When the two girls find Tommy he has also done two donations but is in much better shape than Ruth. At the beach Ruth asks Kathy and Tommy to forgive her for keeping them apart. She explains that she was jealous of their love and was scared to be left alone. Ruth wants to put things right though and gives them the address of Madame which she tracked down so they could apply for a deferral. Kathy eventually agrees and after she goes to the hospital to tell Ruth that they will apply Ruth completes on her third donation. Kathy and Tommy finally begin a relationship. Tommy shows Kathy all the artwork he has done over the years in the hope that he could someday apply for a deferral. The two talk about Kathy’s incident with the porno magazines and he tells her he knew what she was really doing; she was looking for her original. Kathy confides in him and tells him that she used to have overwhelming urges to have sex so she believed that had to tell her something about the person she was modeled on. Tommy tells her those feelings were normal. That night they consummate their relationship.

Finally the couple goes to Madame’s house, Tommy bringing along his artwork, and they tell her they’re there to apply for a deferral. Madame entertains them for a while until the headmistress from Hailsham, Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling), comes into the room. The two women explain that The Gallery was not used to look into the souls of the students; it was used to see if they had any souls at all. They tell Kathy and Tommy that there are no deferrals and they never have been. On their way back to the hospital Tommy asks Kathy to stop in the middle of the road. He gets out of the car and begins to scream, much like he used to do when he was a boy. Kathy hugs him and they remain embraced in the street. The film cuts back to the opening scene where Tommy is being prepped for surgery. Kathy narrates once again and it is revealed that Tommy completed during the surgery. The final scene of the film shows Kathy getting out of her car in the country side and staring at a field behind a wired fence. She has been given her notice and will start her donations. She says this is the place she goes to where she imagines everything she lost in her childhood returns. She fantasizes about Tommy appearing in the horizon and waving at her but claims this is as far as she lets the fantasy go. Kathy wonders whether her and her friends’ lives are so different from the lives of the people they save.

Commentary

Never Let Me Go is a truly poignant story about what it means to be human, what it means to have a soul. The film tackles these issues in a truly beautiful and sad way. The characters in the film have a limited amount of time before they are forced to give up their lives for the sake of humanity. Despite the level of science fiction in the story, these characters are clones made for organ donation, the emotions and experiences of these clones force the audience to evaluate just how limited life is and put into perspective the passing of time. Never Let Me Go is not just a love story, but it does a beautiful job of highlighting the love between the characters Kathy and Tommy and how important it is in life to express one’s emotions. In order for the film to portray the themes and messages Kazuo Ishiguro wrote in the original book it needed to look beautiful and solemn in a very constrained manner. There is tension and beauty in every shot of the film, filling each moment with emotion that is just lying underneath the surface. 

One of the tools used to create the mood of the film was the color palette. Every color is carefully controlled into a pastel theme. The design team of the film painted walls and carefully chose props that wouldn’t saturate the world of the characters. Giving the film this soft and subdued color scheme reflects the morbid tones of the eventual death all these characters will face. Although everyone has to die at some point, the characters in the film were made to die for others, and the colors in every shot reflect the lack of life these characters will lead. For example, in the scene where Ms. Emily tells the young students of Hailsham what their duty will be when they are young adults the room is filled with shades of blue and gray. It is raining outside, no sun to bring any hope or color into the world of these children. The tone of the conversation is extremely serious and incredibly tragic, one color out of place would have ruined the mood.

One of the only scenes where color is much more vivid is when Kathy and Tommy are taking a walk in the cottages. They’re in the woods and sunlight is pouring through the leaves creating rich tones of yellow and green. In the scene Tommy reveals to Kathy that he’s never stopped loving her by discussing the possibility of couples getting deferrals if they could prove they were in love. Of course at this moment Kathy knows it’s too late and too much has happened for her and Tommy to think about being a couple. However, the bright colors in the scene highlight the small hope Kathy holds onto.

This scene between Tommy and Kathy presents one of two other factors that helped perfect the tone of the film; shot types and the actors. Due to the restrained emotions in the film, there aren’t any melodramatic moments and the action is very tame, it was imperative for the film to show intense emotions subtlety. The acting in the film is amazing thanks to the skill of Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley. Of course the children playing the young version of the characters were equally important and their acting was just as expressive as their older counterparts. The type of shots used to effectively carry emotion in the actor’s faces were medium close-ups and close-ups. These tight shots allow the audience to see the subtle changes in emotion that these actors carried out. Perhaps the most effective were the medium close-ups and close-ups of Carey Mulligan’s Kathy. Kathy is a character that doesn’t really speak up to express herself, her intense emotions are held inside and she understands things intuitively. The following scenes are examples of how aptly the two actresses, Carey and Isobel, express Kathy’s emotions and how the camera is able to capture them.

These are some other examples of when intense emotion was highlighted yet controlled through the camera and acting skills. Specifically these are mostly medium close ups.

One of the things the story does well is withhold information. Instead of spelling everything out for the audience Kazuo Ishiguro created a story that needed to be analyzed in order to be understood. Mark Romanek, the director, was able to transfer the mystery of Hailsham and the lives of these poor characters into film by staying true to Ishiguro’s subtleties. The words such as “donor” and “possible” are clues to the state of being that these characters live. The subtlety works itself into the message of the film because audiences need a level of abstraction in order to deal with the existential themes of the film. This kind of story, about what it means to be human and what it means to have a soul or to love, in the context of science fiction, does not hold the same amount of gravity or emotion had it been told too directly. The director’s careful use of cinematography captures moments of loss (of innocence, of love, of life) in aesthetically beautiful ways to underscore the tragedy.

The director’s use of the music is equally important. One of the most important songs played throughout the film at different moments is “We All Complete” by British composer Rachel Portman. The title references the fact that everyone’s lives, both inside the film and out, will eventually end. It is played at key points, most empathetically it is played throughout the ending scenes of the film; Tommy’s scream, Kathy and Tommy at the hospital for Tommy’s last donation, and the closing scene of Kathy in the country side.

Never Let Me Go is a haunting film that forces audiences to evaluate what exactly makes someone human. Having a soul is explored throughout the film and most importantly the component of love. Through its poignant story and careful craftsmanship Never Let Me Go leaves a lasting impression and demands audiences to look at time closely and not let it go to waste.