I Think I Need a New Heart

Never Let Me Go (Romanek, 2010)

For a movie with such a gut-wrenching premise, I expected this film to be more visceral. Admittedly, I have never read any of Kazuo Ishiguro’s books (despite having been assigned one in a grad school seminar), but for some reason I had the preconception that his writing style was lyrical and that this lyricism would be translated into a very visually powerful film. This assumption was, no doubt, largely responsible for my initial feeling that Never Let Me Go was lacking something stylistically.

At first, the mise-en-scène struck me as overly sparse—a failure to fully utilize the medium and an over-reliance on narrative. Certainly, there are vivid, beautiful moments in the film that are hauntingly powerful. They are, however, relatively few and far between. And that, of course, is the point. Everything about the world the characters inhabit is sparse and controlled. The muted tones and minimalist mise-en-scène perfectly convey the characters’ entrapment in a world that offers precious few opportunities for genuine emotional experiences. The film’s style also works to keep viewers at an emotional distance preventing it from turning into pure melodrama. Surely, we feel for the characters, but our emotional attachment to them is limited by the rules that govern their world and by the fact that their own capacities for emotion are so stunted.

Tommy (Andrew Garfield) is bullied as a child in part because the only way he can find to express emotion is through fits of rage—a phase he doesn’t ever outgrow. Indeed, the two moments in which Kathy (Carey Mulligan) attempts to comfort him during one of his outbursts demonstrate how little changes for these characters over the course of their lives. I found Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Tommy and Kathy’s friend Ruth annoying at worst and forgettable at best, though that may be due more to a lack of character development than to any failure on her part. Carey Mulligan’s performance makes me even sadder that I haven’t seen An Education (Scherfig, 2009) yet. She is absolutely mesmerizing. Throughout the film, she maintains a quiet power that both draws us to her and holds us at a distance.

The visual style, which initially struck me as surprisingly restrained, is perhaps best described as repressed. Everything about the film is working to limit our cathexis, to alienate us from the characters—perhaps so we are better able to contemplate their own experience of alienation from the world, from each other, and from themselves. While this may be frustrating for viewers (as I gather it has been for some reviewers), I don’t think it constitutes a failure on the film’s part; on the contrary, Never Let Me Go is utterly successful at rendering its world of alienation and detachment.

One of my tests of a good movie is that I have been so absorbed in the world of the film that I leave the theater feeling displaced and unsure how to be in the world as it is. In that regard, Never Let Me Go is a resounding success. I left one world of dystopian alienation and repression and emerged into the over-stimulating mise-en-scène of a suburban mall feeling even more lost.