Young & Tragic

“I wish that we were magic so we wouldn’t be so young and tragic.”

Knowing full well author Louis Lowry’s clampdown on ever allowing her dystopian classic, “The Giver”, to grace the silver screen, children’s science-fiction fans must accept the movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” as the next best thing. Starring Carey Mulligan (An Education), Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) and Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Caribbean) unfortunately, the movie itself was not captivating. By the third act it loses all semblance of reality. It frivolously explores the metaphysics of the soul, shows the graphic loss of spleens and all together loses any amusement it spurns in the first act where none of the main actors are present because the viewer observes them in childhood as students of the strict boarding school called Harrow. The story itself however, is incredibly thought provoking. Tracking the lives of three outsiders from grammar school to their final days, it is the perfect blend of British norms of responsibility and class structure with that of Japanese wisdom and emotional sentiment. Although the children are born for the purpose of someone else’s gain (being the eventual donation of their organs in order to preserve the life of the leisure class), throughout the film director Mark Romanek does his best to show these hopeless hopefuls do indeed possess souls. Doomed from the get-go the movie raises issues of love and loss, not being able to acclimate to the outside world after being subjected to such a rigorous regime, subculture as permanence, art as a political action, unrequited love, the struggle to mature, jealousy, deceit, reflexivity and the suppression of emotion, to name a few. In “Never Let Me Go” closeness and community revolve around myth. By not mentioning anything on their predetermined future, the children of Harrow are able to escape from their somber and dreary reality, at first. Although this becomes a burden to most, Kathy H. played by Cary Mulligan, has the most fulfilling life between her and her doomed friends yet somehow maintains a steady head amongst great adversity including losing the only person she loves various times throughout her short life to another girl and then to death. Some may consider Romanek and Ishiguro sick and morbid for only giving their main characters a fleeting glimpse of a fantasy ending. Those who enjoy the film appreciate the anti-fantastical theme the writer and director explore because they feel the outside world isn’t such a happy place either.