Climbing Higher Pictures

It’s that time of the year. Award season is right around the corner, and a number of buzzworthy projects are picking up steam. One of them is Never Let Me Go, based on the international bestseller of the same name. Does the film live up to its critically acclaimed source material, or does it flounder in adaptation hell?

Never Let Me Go Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie: A+

I can honestly say that I have never had the kind of emotional experience I had while watching Never Let Me Go in a theater before. It’s impossible to know exactly what it is about the film that makes it resonate the way it does, but everything about it seems flawless. The work pulls you from your seat and sends you spinning through time and space in such a meaningful way that it’s difficult to shake the feeling of loss when the credits roll. These are real people, people whose lives you have vicariously shared, and you feel like you’ve aged right along with them. Capturing that kind of experience on film, and delivering a story with such a massive chronology in less than two hours is something that deserves the highest praise and admiration.

It’s almost a struggle deciding where to begin. The actors seem like a logical place, but we’ve seen Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley perform before, and they’ve never been on this level. The wonderful direction goes to Mark Romanek, whose One Hour Photo may seem to suggest a different mentality than what the material required. On the contrary, he imbues the film with an elegant and classical pace, allowing all of the actors to really inhabit their characters. The most impressive part of the film’s casting is the performances by the child actors. With the exception of Let the Right One In, I’ve never seen young performers pull off these kinds of subtle beats, and they set the bar incredibly high for when the star power appears. It’s in the quiet moments and pauses are where everything truly shines, and each lead is pulling more dramatic weight than an average standalone movie. Even Keira Knightley, who has been less than compelling in some of her recent work, comes out of this one with an impressive level of commitment and honesty. These aren’t characters, they’re people, and the belief is often so strong that it overrides our mental reminders that we are watching a movie.

The cinematography in this film is of a level that surpasses any and all expectations. Adam Kimmel, who also sat behind the camera on Capote, has crafted an incredibly beautiful visual landscape for what amounts to being a period piece science fiction story. Rachel Portman’s score is a veritable masterpiece, drawing the entire narrative together along a single musical thread. The symphonic nature of the music fits perfectly with the timeframe the story takes place in, and pushes the internal struggles of the protagonists into the open. You can’t help but get swept along, and Portman may give Hanz Zimmer (Inception) a run for his money come Oscar season.

The plot itself is the kind of mystery that isn’t terribly difficult to figure out, but also paces itself quite nicely over the entire film. It’s not so much that you don’t know what’s coming, but that it takes its time giving you the information you need to confirm your suspicions. The opening scene pretty much shows you everything you need to know to understand the film, and beyond saying that it’s technically “science-fiction” since it’s not a documentary and involves scientific research and development which hasn’t actually occurred, I’m not going to go any farther into it. Easiest explanation, it’s like Children of Men but without the futuristic cars and buildings. Wikipedia the original novel if you’re really that curious, but again, the film is not about twist endings or surprises, but human interaction and the way people live their lives. I’m as much a fan of laser guns as the next guy, but this certainly isn’t that kind of story.

Never Let Me Go is a phenomenal piece of cinema, an achievement from every possible angle. It will move you, probably not in the way you expect, and you will leave the theater with the same glazed and empty feeling you have after finishing a wonderful book. I suspect there may be a backlash to the film by those who are uncomfortable allowing themselves to experience the true beauty of the work, and that’s really a disappointment. For everyone else, this is going to be one of those movies that you will remember for years to come, and sits proudly among the best 2010 has to offer.